


Anyhow, Anywhere, Anytime

by bluehat



Category: Critical Role (Web Series), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (most likely), (sort of), Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Abuse, Car Accidents, Character Study, Drowning, Execution, F/F, F/M, Family Member Death, Happy Ending, Historical Inaccuracy, M/M, Self-Hatred, Spoilers for critical role, Spoilers up to at least episode 111, Suicide Attempt, Team as Family, The Old Guard AU, Torture, Wartime, World War II, You don't have to have seen The Old Guard to read this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-12 08:14:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 52,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28507269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluehat/pseuds/bluehat
Summary: After running away from military school and getting into a fatal motorcycle crash, Beauregard doesn't die. Instead, she meets up with a group of other immortals who have worked for centuries as a semi-mercenary, semi-peacekeeping team, traveling the world to fight wherever there is money or a cause. (Critical Role/Old Guard AU)
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Mollymauk Tealeaf, Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast, Fjord/Jester Lavorre
Comments: 266
Kudos: 330





	1. Chapter 1 - Beau

Beauregard Lionett punched the wall of her small dormitory room, a few flakes of plaster coming away with her clenched fist. A piece of paper fluttered to the ground from her other hand, nearly ripped in half. The slight impression of impact joined many along Beau’s wall, marks of years spent at the Cobalt Soul military academy.

Her father’s words were swimming before her eyes—the first words she’d heard from him in years. _We wanted to inform you, Beauregard, that we have had a son._ A son. She had a brother.

She blinked furiously, refusing to admit that there were tears in her eyes. She had decided years ago that nothing her parents could do could hurt her anymore. So this—this letter—it didn’t matter at all. Nothing he could say mattered to her anymore.

As long as Beau had been alive, her father had seemed to tower over her, even when she grew to nearly his height. His presence was naturally intimidating, which perhaps was what made him such a powerful businessman. His cold eyes and distant attitude had been a prominent feature of her childhood, when she still occasionally attempted to please him. But nothing she did ever worked. One thing she’d had to learn is that there was no pleasing him, no matter what she did. She was simply a child that he didn’t want, and certainly didn’t love. She earned his disapproval even when she behaved, so eventually she had learned not to bother.

She’d grown up just outside of Silicon Valley, thanks to her father’s tech company. It wasn’t the ideal location for a child. Too far from anyone her age to make friends, and yet far too close to the business of the city. She’d learned to understand business language almost as early as she’d learned her colors. The only thing she liked about the city was the proximity to the ocean. After a particularly vicious argument with her parents, she’d hop on a bus and ride down to the beach, staring out at the endless water. One night, she’d gone out to a stone jutting out of the waves, collapsed onto it, and sat there until morning.

When she’d gone home, it was like no one had even noticed she’d left.

It was when she grew old enough to see her father for who he truly was that she’d begun to rebel. How could she not? What else was there to do? When her father spent hours in his study poring over blueprints, it was easy for her to sneak in and grab papers. He could be right in front of her and he’d never notice. And her mother would be somewhere in their huge, minimalist mansion of metal and glass, staring out the window into a world she refused to interact with. Selling the blueprints to rival companies was honestly one of the simplest things she’d ever done.

And then, she’d met Tori. Her contact at another company. A little older than her, but so, so beautiful. And more than anything, Tori listened to her. She laughed at Beau’s jokes, and when she looked into Beau’s eyes she felt more seen than she had in her entire life. So Beau didn’t worry about the way Tori’s eyes left hers to greedily fall upon the blueprints and files she gave her. If that was the price for Tori’s love, Beau would happily pay it. There had been no price she’d been able to pay for her father’s love, so even a small chance of something real was better than nothing.

Of course, her father had found out about that, too. One day, she’d been walking out of his office, papers under her arm, and a hand had caught her wrist from behind. That day, she felt like he was truly looking at her, but the pure rage in his eyes made her wish to be invisible. He hadn’t said a word to her, her mother looking on worriedly but not daring to intervene. He’d thrown her into the living room and made a phone call, as she sat there, wondering if she should make a break for the door.

Before she could make up her mind, the Cobalt Soul representatives had been at her door. Her father took one last look at her, slapped her across the face, and sent her with them. They’d promised him she’d learn respect, and she spat at him and swore to herself that that was one thing she’d never do. Later that day she found out he’d had Tori arrested, and she refused to cry as they tossed her into a cold, empty room with a cot and told her she’d be learning from the best.

In her years at the Cobalt Soul Military Academy, she’d excelled in the lessons on martial combat and pointedly ignored the lessons on anything else. Whenever anyone would look at her like she had promise, she’d find a way to hurt them until they knew to ignore her. Beau wasn’t going to follow their traditions, and she certainly wasn’t going to graduate with honors. She wanted to learn anything useful these idiots could possibly teach her, and then get the hell out of dodge before they could get anything out of her.

As she ground her heel into the letter page on the ground, she knew the time had come. She ripped off her cadet’s uniform, throwing on a tank top and jeans instead. She half-grinned as she remembered the hell of a time she’d given them trying to make her wear the uniform in the first place. She’d tormented them with her stubbornness for so long they’d nearly given up by the time she finally relented. They thought she was some pampered rich girl, but she’d show them the dedication that being raised in that house had given her.

Beau slung a duffel bag with a few extra outfits and the little money that she had over her shoulder. She didn’t know where she was going or what she’d do when she got there, but she knew she didn’t care. It was time for her to go. This one letter—the final indication that her parents truly wanted nothing do with her—was all the push she needed.

She slammed open the door. It didn’t matter if they saw her go. What could they do? When Beau was on the warpath, she dared anyone to stand in her way.

As she half-walked, half-ran down the hallway, a voice called out to her from a doorway she passed.

“Beau,” the familiar voice said, and Beau turned to see the face of Dairon, her main instructor. After she’d run most of the rest of the staff through their paces, they’d sent Dairon to deal with her. Beau had expected Dairon to be stuffy and overbearing like the rest of the instructors, but if there was anyone at the Cobalt Soul that Beau respected, it was her.

“You can’t stop me from leaving,” Beau snapped at Dairon, pausing for just a moment in her angry stride.

“I’m not trying to,” Dairon said, putting their hands up in mock surrender.

“Then—what?” Beau said.

“I just wanted to wish you luck. I hope we meet again, Beau,” Dairon said.

Beau opened her mouth, but was suddenly unsure of what she was going to say. She stood there for a moment before she snapped her mouth shut and stomped a few steps further down the hall.

“Bye, Dairon,” she tossed over her shoulder, and then she kept walking, turning a corner and losing sight of her former teacher. She felt like some of the steam had been taken out of her stride by the strange interaction, but then the image of the letter came to her mind again. Flowery words spelling out a simple message, one she’d always known but somehow still hurt to hear: _We never wanted you. And now that we’ve got someone better, we don’t need you at all._ Her father finally had the son he wanted, and so his rebellious daughter was finally free, but also completely alone.

“Cadet, where are you—” a guard tried to ask her, but she just brushed past him. No one really made an effort to stop her. This wasn’t even her first time breaking out of the facility, but it was the first time she had no plans to return.

Within a few moments, she found herself in a parking lot, blue California sky shining down on her. She took a deep breath, absorbing the wind and fresh air on her sunbaked skin. She brushed a few strands of her hair back into her short half-shaved ponytail and stretched deeply.

She looked around at all the cars, considering. Although most of her espionage under her father had involved tech theft, she had also enjoyed a spot of joyriding. A few of the cars looked nice enough, but…

A deep blue motorcycle stood gleaming in the afternoon sun, as if it were calling her name. Her face split into a full grin for the first time that day, and she walked over to it. As if it were fate, in the small pouch at the front, there was the key. Idiot. Whoever owned this beauty was practically _asking_ for her to steal it.

There was no helmet, but she decided she didn’t need it. Beau courted danger, so what was one more risk?

She kicked the motorcycle into gear, relishing in the purr of the engine. It hummed under her like a living thing. It had been years since she’d been able to ride one, and she just sat there for a moment enjoying the feeling of power. Then, a shout came from behind her, and she realized it was time to go.

Beau went sailing out of the parking lot with ease, motorcycle roaring under her. She leaned forward as the wind whipped around her, feeling a moment of freedom and autonomy unlike any in a long time. For a moment, her father’s cold words slipped from her mind. The road seemed to stretch out in front of her, endless and empty.

She couldn’t resist leaning her head back and letting out a full-body laugh, mouth wide with a wolfish grin. When she blinked, a tear slid down the side of her face. She slowed as she began to approach a traffic light, lifting her arm to wipe the shameful evidence of her moment of emotion away.

The light was turning yellow, but she kept going. Somehow, she felt that if she stopped, things would change, and in this moment everything was precisely as she wanted it to be. She leaned down to speed up even more, feeling the sun on the asphalt reflecting back onto the hot metal of the bike.

Out of the corner of her eye, Beau saw a truck approaching, far too fast, as she sped through the yellow light. She felt the hot breath of its exhaust touch her and she knew in a moment that it would be over. She didn’t have time for any eloquent final thoughts, or a soliloquy on her short and angry life. She only had time for one bitter internal sentiment. _Well, fuck._

Beau would’ve liked to have been knocked out by the impact, but somehow she stayed awake as the truck smashed into her, feeling her bones crack and skin tear. She was thrown from the bike by the crash, landing twenty, thirty feet away, body twisting like a ragdoll. The pain was incredible and overwhelming, like nothing she’d ever felt. She saw fire and ash around her as her eyes slipped closed, the life leaving her body.

Beau blinked her eyes open, hearing a beeping sound. For a moment, she was surrounded by the memory of indescribable pain, but then the memory was gone and her body was her own again. She turned her head slowly, recognizing the white walls for the hospital room that it was. She looked down at her hands, surprising herself when she was able to lift them. She experimentally clenched one hand into a fist, shocked when the action was painless. She twitched her legs, and they responded. If she hadn’t known better, she would’ve thought she was waking up in her bed at the Cobalt Soul.

But she knew she remembered her body twisting, the red-hot agony that came from parts of her body not being where they were supposed to be. As she lifted the hospital blanket, her limbs looked untouched. She leaned back, letting out a sigh. Had the accident been a strange nightmare?

“Miss Lionett?” a voice said from nearby. “How are you feeling?” A nurse walked in, looking strangely apprehensive.

“I’m fine,” Beau grunted.

The nurse nodded, looking her over with an uncomfortable, shifting glance. “Yes, you seem to be,” she said, voice sounding odd somehow. “Oh—you have visitors, if you’d like to see them.”

“…Visitors?” Beau said. Could it be her parents? Would they really have come?

“Yes… your extended family, they said?” The nurse gave her a small smile. “They said they’ve come a long way to see you.”

Beau frowned in confusion, refusing to feel slight disappointment that her parents hadn’t even bothered to come. Who the hell could that be? But, fuck it. This day was weird enough already. “Sure, they can come.”

The nurse nodded and left the room, calling out to someone further down the hall, the door swinging shut behind her. Before it fully stopped moving, a hand reached out to pull it open once more.

The people entering the room were among the strangest Beau had ever seen. The first to enter was a man so incredibly tall he had to bend to make it through the doorframe, brown hair streaked with gray falling low on his lanky frame. Then a woman, also impressively tall, face so chiseled it made Beau’s heart skip a beat and long blonde hair braided with beads. Two men followed. One looked tired and grimy, wearing a coat and scarf, the second wore an ostentatious coat and hat. The first man was followed by a very small woman with two dark braids.

Beau figured that had to be all of them, but then a woman with impressively tightly curled hair and a huge smile skipped inside, followed finally by a sheepish-looking man with short black hair with a gray streak and a small scar across his eye.

Beau watched them all suspiciously as they walked in, eyes narrowing. Her body felt tired and achy, and this day was confusing, and the pain of the letter still lingered in the back of her mind. The last thing she needed was some random weirdos who had decided to make themselves her problem.

“Who the fuck are you?” she burst out, when the group seemed to be internally deciding who should speak first. “I don’t want in on whatever weird cult this is. Get out of my room.”

“I’m sorry, Beauregard, but we can’t do that.” The tallest man was the one to speak, voice deep and calming. “My name is Caduceus Clay, and we’re here to welcome you to the Mighty Nein.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I'm not the first to think of this, but I haven't read any of the other ideas so I hope mine isn't too similar! I just couldn't get this AU out of my head.


	2. Chapter 2

The group looked at Beau expectantly, as if their words were supposed to mean something to her. She felt as if she’d never been so exhausted in her life.

“The Mighty Nine…?” she said, mentally counting the mere seven people in front of her.

“Nein! Not nine,” said the cheerful-looking woman, as if her words made any sense. Beau couldn’t quite place her accent.

“N-E-I-N,” clarified the flamboyantly dressed man in a tone that sounded vaguely Irish. “Like German ‘no.’ Not like there’s nine of us. Although with you, we’re on our way.”

“Okay,” said Beau. “What the fuck? Are you _actually_ a cult?”

“Not really,” the woman said. “I mean… sort of?”

“Jester, you’re not making us sound great,” said the Texan man next to her.

“We’re only sort of a cult,” said the tall man, whose presence seemed to pacify the rest of them. “As I said, I’m Caduceus. This is Jester,” he indicated the cheerful woman, “Fjord,” the Texan man, “Nott,” the short woman, “Caleb,” the silent man next to her, “Mollymauk,” the Irish man, “…and Yasha.” The tall woman with the cheekbones that Beau couldn’t quite distract herself from nodded silently. She was wearing a huge cloak that obscured most of her body, but it just made her seem more mysterious. And those eyes… Beau shook herself back to reality.

“And I’m Beau,” Beau said. “Now are you going to explain yourselves or are you going to get the fuck out before I deck you? You’re not related to me, whatever the hell you told the nurse.”

“Ooh, I like her!” Jester said, smiling at her in an impressive display of aggressive cheer.

Caduceus chuckled. “We’re a group of likeminded individuals, you could say.”

Beau quirked an eyebrow. “…Likeminded how?”

“We are immortal.” The previously silent man Caduceus had introduced as Caleb spoke for the first time. “Like you.”

Beau snorted. “Oh, that’s a new one. How much do I have to pay for the monthly subscription to stay young forever? Damn. It’s kind of a hustle how you’re doing this at a hospital. I’d almost respect it if I wasn’t about to kick your ass.”

“Beau,” Jester said gently. “You died. But now you’re here!”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” Fjord said.

“I mean, it was a bad accident, but I guess I got really lucky,” Beau said, rolling her eyes. She ignored the way the hair on her neck was starting to stand up, as if something in her was reacting to their words.

“We’ve all been through it,” Caduceus said gently. “Many of us have died many times. But we always get back up without a scratch.”

“Yeah, fuck you, okay, get out,” Beau said sharply. “I almost died. I don’t need this shit right now.”

“But you’re fine,” Mollymauk said, gesturing to her. She glared at him. “You haven’t got a nick on you, have you?”

Beau started to get up. “Nurse! Nurse!” she called out, trying to disentangle the IV attached to her arm.

Mollymauk sighed. “Yasha?” he said, gesturing to the tall woman. Beau paused, confused.

Yasha reached behind her and from under her long cloak, she pulled a sword almost as large as Nott. Beau just gaped at it, feeling quite certain that something in her brain had been irrevocably damaged in the accident.

“Sorry,” Yasha grunted. “But this will be faster.”

Beau was distracted by the gruff sound of Yasha’s voice, and nearly missed the sword skewering her through the heart.

She looked down at it, choking.

“Yasha!” Jester said, frowning. “Molly, why did you…?”

Beau’s consciousness faded, blood dribbling down her chin. Just her luck. Survive a horrifying accident without a scratch, only to be murdered hours later by a pack of crazies in the hospital. “What… the… fuck…” she gasped out, and then slumped forward, dead.

She awoke a moment later to excruciating pain. The sword going in had barely even hurt, the shock had been so sudden, but as she looked down at her chest she watched it slowly being pushed out of her body as her skin literally knit itself back together before her eyes.

“Oh,” Yasha said, watching her as she gaped at the sword slowly exiting her chest. With a swift motion, Yasha pulled it out again, leaving a trail of blood dripping behind it. Yasha quickly wiped down the sword with a corner of the hospital sheet and returned it to the sheath on her back.

With the barrier gone, Beau’s skin completed its return to form and she placed a hand on her chest where the hole had been to find nothing but a rip in her hospital gown. She felt like her breath was coming far too fast, and with a swift motion she leaned down and ripped the IV from her arm. It hurt more than movies had led her to believe, but she was able to stagger out of her bed, backing herself against the wall as she held the gown closed.

“Get away from me!” she growled as Jester took a step towards her.

“Molly, look what you did!” Jester murmured.

“Sorry,” Molly said, looking utterly unapologetic.

“Beauregard, you’re going to be fine. We’ll help you. But you need to come with us,” Caduceus said in a pacifying tone.

“Fuck that! She stabbed me!” Beau said, pointing at Yasha, whose gaze remained unblinking and unaffected.

“It was the fastest way to prove ourselves,” Yasha said softly.

Beau closed her eyes and took a deep breath, half expecting the group to be gone when she opened them again. Unfortunately, she was not so lucky. She considered them for a moment, then took a step towards them, feet somewhat shaky underneath her.

“Beau…?” Jester said, smiling softly and reaching out a hand. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Beau grunted. “So if I go with you guys… you’ll answer all of my questions?”

“Of course!” Molly said, grinning.

“That was easy,” Nott said.

Beau took another step forward, and then sidestepped Jester’s incoming hug and sprinted through the door to her left.

“Fuck,” Nott said with a sigh.

Not for the first time, Beau wondered how her life had come to this as she ducked around hospital hallways, hiding from the “Mighty Nine” or whatever they decided to call themselves. She was decidedly ignoring everything that had happened regarding the wound that may or may not have existed in her chest.

The nurse must have put her on some _strong_ drugs considering she was apparently hallucinating and feeling no pain at all from the accident. She was gonna find that woman and rip her a new one for both her medication choice and possibly for allowing complete strangers in to see her (if those strangers were even real and not just a figment of Beau’s overactive pain-reliever-ridden imagination, which was still a valid option).

She backed against another corner, listening before turning it. Luckily, her life of petty crime had trained her pretty decently in the art of stealth—or at least in getting far away from people who definitely wanted to arrest and/or kill her.

She heard the familiar voice of the strange nurse from earlier, and was about to confront her when she paid more attention to the words she was saying.

“She came in looking—terrible. The EMTs said she was dead for _fifteen minutes_.”

“ _Fifteen?_ That’s—impossible.” A man’s voice joined hers.

“I know! Both of her legs were broken _._ Arms as well. Six broken ribs, too—and her head was practically split open. But when I went back in there five minutes ago, she looked like _nothing had happened.”_

“…Are you sure?”

“She had a _crack down her skull_ and it’s _gone._ ”

Beau unconsciously lifted her hand to touch her forehead. She looked down at her completely unscathed body. She remembered the image of her skin knitting itself back together around the sword.

“What are we gonna do?” The man spoke again, sounding nervous.

“I don’t know. I know the doctor already called someone—”

“Like who? The—like the government…? God, what the hell. This is so weird…”

Beau had heard enough, and turned around. She needed clothes, and then she needed to get the fuck out of here. If there was even the slightest chance this was real, she wasn’t about to stick around and become some government experiment. She’d spent her entire life resisting authority, so it was time to put that practice to use.

She ducked into a likely-looking room and was pleased to see a supply closet. Some light rifling through bins later, she had on a new set of scrubs. Not ideal, but better than a gown. Time to make her escape.

Beau walked down the hall, trying to project confidence. All she had to do was act like she belonged, and no one would question her. Beauregard Lionett, medical extraordinaire.

This plan would have worked great, if she hadn’t walked directly into her nurse from earlier.

“Ma’am?” the nurse said, looking her up and down. “Where did you get those? I’m going to need you to go back to your room—”

“Shit,” Beau huffed, and started running. Shouts began to follow her, but she ignored them and just kept head down and legs moving. She’d done a brief stint on the track team in high school, before her coach started having “expectations” and it moved from something that kept her out of the house for longer and into something that had actual responsibilities. She’d ditched it and never shown up again, but there were some lessons she’d never forgotten.

No one could outrun Beau when she got going.

She whipped past groups of medical staff, many of them who gaped at her as she jetted past them before the shouts behind her caught up to them. Beau saw a door with an exit sign over it and booked it in that direction, but as soon as it came into view a security guard stepped in front.

“Ma’am,” he said, arms outstretched like a catcher at a baseball game. She almost rolled her eyes. What kind of stance was that? Who even trained these guys?

Without slowing down, she ran straight up to him and, using her running momentum, grabbed his arm and pulled him up and around her. He barely even had time to squawk in indignation as she flipped him fully over herself and slammed him into the ground behind her. She didn’t pause before she burst through the doors and kept running, leaving him groaning on the floor.

Beau sprinted through the lobby, breath starting to come a little heavy, but her military endurance wasn’t failing her yet. She’d been disciplined with enough laps to be able to run most marathons several times over. Another security guard at the door tried to reach for her, but she slid to her knees on the linoleum flooring and ducked past his arms through the automatic doors.

She got to her feet in a swift motion and leaped, fresh air within her grasp.

Suddenly, all the air felt like it was knocked out of her chest at once. A pair of incredibly strong arms wrapped around her torso from someone who had been waiting by the outside of the doors. Before she could cry out, the person jumped into a waiting van, pulling her with them.

The doors slammed shut, and for a moment it was too dark to see anything as she wheezed and struggled ineffectually against the steel grip of her kidnapper.

“Let me go!” she shouted. “Argh!” She tried again to escape as her eyes began to adjust, but the arms were immovable.

There was a clicking sound, and a small lighter flame suddenly lit up the interior of the dark van. Beau was somehow not at all surprised to see the group of people who had decided to make her life miserable around her. Through a grate, she could see Caduceus driving, and as Caleb held up the lighter she saw the mixture of eager and apprehensive expressions on the rest of the group.

She craned her neck and saw Yasha’s face holding her still, and finally stopped struggling.

“I know you don’t believe us, but we’re really trying to help you, Beau,” Jester said, expression more at place on a pouting child on a disappointing birthday than an adult kidnapper.

“I don’t need your help,” Beau snarled.

“Yes you do,” Molly declared. “Unless you want to end up a government experiment. Believe me, we’ve come close, and it’s no fun at all.”

Beau glared at him, unable to come up with an immediate retort. He smiled smarmily in response.

“You can’t actually expect me to believe you’re _immortal_ ,” Beau said.

“We are,” Yasha said very quietly.

“Most people don’t just get up again when Yasha stabs them,” Molly pointed out. “And from the look of your injuries after the accident, that wasn’t the first time.”

Beau breathed heavily. “I don’t believe you,” she said, and Nott rolled her eyes. “But if I did… how did you find me?”

“You were in our dreams,” Fjord said. “That’s how it works. Like the world is trying to connect us. We saw you die, so we came. Luckily, we were already in the area.”

She looked around at all of them, all looking to be in their twenties or thirties. “How old… _are_ you?” she asked hesitantly.

“Beau!” Jester said, sounding jokingly scandalized. “That’s not a question a lady likes to answer!”

Beau just looked around at all of them. Perhaps it was simply the firelight, but many of their eyes looked deeply tired, in spite of their young faces.

“We are very old,” Yasha said. As Beau turned to look at her, she looked deeply into Beau’s eyes and Beau had to fight the urge to look away. Yasha seemed to consider her for a moment, and then released her iron grasp.

Beau rubbed her arms, ignoring the way she kind of missed the warmth after they were gone. She leaned into a more comfortable seated position against the side of the van, and let out a deep, shuddering breath.

“So what are we doing?” Beau asked.

“We’re on a job right now,” Molly said. “We do mercenary work, mostly.”

“For good causes!” Jester assured her, grinning. “Stuff that only _we_ can do, with our particular… skill set!”

Caleb looked at her, clicking the lighter off and on again as the flame began to sputter. “Are you in?”

Beau looked around at this group of strange individuals. What the hell. A few hours ago she’d had no destination in mind, and although she wasn’t sure yet that this wasn’t a _very_ weird dream, what better option did she have?

“Fuck it, why not,” she said with a shrug. Didn’t really seem like she had much of a choice either way. Jester cheered and looked like she wanted to hug her, but didn’t try, which in Beau’s opinion was wise. Beau wasn’t quite sure whether or not she was going to have to fight her way out yet, but for now, she had to go along with them. To her surprise, Yasha patted her on the shoulder.

The lighter flickered out again, and Beau craned her head to see the sun slowly fading from the sky as the van continued to drive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to comfortcharacters for being my beta for this chapter!! Hope you guys enjoy :)


	3. Interlude - Caduceus

Caduceus Clay no longer remembered the exact year of his birth, nor precisely how many years he’d been wandering the earth. Whenever he tried to think about it, the memories that echoed in his mind seemed so timeless that it felt wrong to try and place them in a specific year. He hadn’t thought much about time even during what he considered to be his “first life,” so to speak—his time at the temple with his family.

Still, when pressed by the more fact-oriented members of the Mighty Nein—Caleb came to mind—he had to estimate the time of his birth to be sometime before what they now called the Common Era. Several hundred years before then, he was fairly sure, but decades and centuries were fuzzy to Caduceus now. He was the oldest of the Mighty Nein, but he was not foolish enough to believe that that made him the most experienced. Much of Caduceus’s long, long life had been spent simply.

He might not remember the exact year, but Caduceus remembered well his hometown and the centuries he’d spent there. Eleusis had been a beautiful place then and remained so to the present day, as far as he knew. Although not far from Athens, he had spent much of his time tending to the green pastures or walking by the coastal Greek waters rather than mingling with the city people. This was in part because Caduceus had never really considered himself that comfortable with an urban lifestyle, and in part because of his family duties.

He had been born into a house whose job it was to protect a temple to Demeter, separated from the rest of the township by a small patch of woods at one of the highest points of the town. The Clay family had been born to serve the goddess, and he would follow in their footsteps. He had been raised for the priesthood since birth, and the responsibility had always sat well with him. He found great pleasure in the belief of his family in Demeter and her daughter Persephone, in the harvest and nature and, perhaps most importantly, in life after death.

Like his father and mother before him, he set aside most worldly relationships in favor of his relationship with the goddess and her domain. The entire family lived in a small domicile not far from the temple, so they would always be near her light, and even as a child he had been among the most fervent believers even among his siblings.

When he took his role as a priest to Demeter, he would show new believers a stalk of grain. In that existed a fundamental proof of life, the seed within ready to sow a new harvest. It was a simple, wonderful life. He did his duties with pride and sometimes even felt like he could hear the voices of nature speaking back to him as he tended to the temple.

Sometimes, even a world’s age later, he could close his eyes and still hear the buzzing of the fireflies and the gentle hum of the ocean breeze on the trees. It brought him great comfort, especially when accompanied by a nice warming mug of tea.

Since his family held the Eleusinian belief in life after death, unusual of the typical Grecian faith of the time, they were often visited by those on the verge of passing from the world. In his childhood, Caduceus had met more mortally ill people than most would meet in a lifetime. Death had always been a constant friend and companion, and he considered it his responsibility to make the deaths of others as comfortable and peaceful as possible.

Then, there came a time of war, as must follow every time of great peace. Caduceus understood little of the conflict, but he knew his duty would remain the same as it always had—to defend the temple. When the soldiers came to raze it to the ground, he knew he would be cut down if he stood in their way, and yet he knew that this was but a trifling thing. It would be rare to find someone more at peace with their own death than Caduceus Clay.

So he stood in the soldiers’ way regardless, and was swiftly dispatched as he knew he would be.

He lay in the grass, breathing his last breaths of the fresh air he had always loved, grateful that he had persuaded his family to leave. They could rebuild the temple and perform the necessary sacraments over his fallen form, and peace would come again. He let his eyes slip closed without complaint.

The blood hadn’t even begun to dry when he woke up again. As he patted his chest, white priest robe ripped and stained but chest unharmed, an unsettled feeling came over him. For Caduceus, death was a natural part of life, and its perversion was against his very faith. For some time, he stayed apart from his family, wandering the coast and all of the most beautiful natural places in his country, searching for an answer.

Eventually, Caduceus came to believe that there was no answer, or at least not one he was meant to understand. He made his way back to his home. His family were overjoyed to see him, and he felt his heart warm again to see them. Whatever had happened, it had given him more time with them, and for that he was grateful.

Of course, they noticed over time that he had ceased to age, and his injuries healed at an unnatural pace. But being the family that they were, they chose to simply let it be. The ways of the world were mysterious and questions would help no one, so the Clay family accepted Caduceus’s new existence.

Caduceus stayed among them as his parents passed, as his siblings grew to be his parents’ age and older, and he remained unchanged. He missed them each dearly as they left him, a part of him wanting to beg them not to go where he could not follow, but he knew he could feel them in the world around him. As he watched over his siblings’ children, and their children, a few noticed. There were whispers among the townsfolk, so Caduceus retreated even further. He rarely left their home. He only went out to tend to the temple, which over generations he helped rebuild and protect.

The world changed around the Clay family, but Caduceus never changed with it. He couldn’t count how many members of his family had come and gone, but he never went with them. The temple remained intact and protected even as it became a relic of an ancient time, as the language and culture of his nation grew and shifted. Some things about his family never changed, however. No one ever asked about Uncle Caduceus, and why after decades his hair had never fully gone gray.

Sometimes he wandered through their home into a back room that few ever entered. Inside were possessions. A toy here, a preserved flower there. The only things he had left to remind him of those who had left him behind and moved on.

He didn’t know if he believed in life after death any more, at least not the way that he had when he had been young once, many centuries ago. But he knew he believed that his family would always live with him, and with the goddess—whether she truly existed or whether she was simply the world itself. It had never mattered to him which was true.

He had been sleeping in his simple room, not having left the temple for years that had become uncountable, when the first dream came to him. He awoke with the sudden, weighty knowledge that he was not as alone in the world as he had believed. He had seen others. Others blessed with the curse of immortality, who were out there in the wide abyss of the untraveled globe.

It was easier than he had thought to leave the temple behind. He trusted his family to maintain it, even though they might not understand why it was important anymore. And so, Caduceus took one huge step into a world he no longer understood. Searching for the others was no simple task, and he did not rush it. He wanted to see the world and gain the knowledge of its workings that he had lost in his centuries of isolation. So many things were new to him, but in a way that was wonderful.

The world was wracked with wars by the time he finally found the others, and he felt that it was fated that he met them in such an age of strife. For so long his only purpose had been to protect a tiny corner of this world, and although he felt that had been immensely valuable, perhaps it was time for his sphere of influence to expand. For although Caduceus had been with his family since childhood, he had been alone among them for almost as long.

He visited each of them, already forming their own enclaves, and none of them took much convincing.

Mollymauk Tealeaf and Yasha Nydoorin were already trying to do good in their own way, and they accepted him as one of them without him even having to ask. Nott the Brave and Caleb Widogast were lost, but he sensed that although they might be damaged, this group would allow the two to repair themselves beautifully. Jester Lavorre and Fjord Stone were raring to do what they could to fix the world, given what they had seen.

The group, raucous and impulsive as they were, reminded him of his siblings. He swore to himself to protect them and help them grow, just as he would nurture his plants back home. They did good where they could, and helped in what ways the world allowed them to. Caduceus learned more of the world and of the violence it could commit, and of the violence he could bring himself to accept when it was required of him.

At the end of the day, his new family brought him great comfort, and he would always be there to put on a pot of tea for them. So when he dreamed of Beauregard Lionett, he smiled to himself and packed an additional cup.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little different, but I hope you enjoy! I'm planning to alternate between each character's life and the main story from here on. Thanks again to my beta comfortcharacters!!! <3


	4. Chapter 4

Beau didn’t remember falling asleep, but suddenly she jerked awake. She wiped away a trail of drool from the corner of her mouth, hoping no one had seen it. It was dark outside now, and she wondered how long they’d been driving for.

“Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Molly drawled out. She glared at him. There was something about his particular brand of obnoxiousness that really rubbed her the wrong way.

Beside him, Jester yawned and picked her head off of Fjord’s shoulder. “Are we almost there?” she said sleepily. Fjord stretched and then leaned back, arm resting gently around her shoulders.

“By the way,” Beau interjected. “Where are we going?”

“L.A,” Nott answered, uncurling from next to Caleb, whose tired eyes did not indicate that he had slept at all. “We’ve got a job.”

“Yeah, okay, gonna need more details than that,” Beau said.

“This is the second half of the mission,” Caleb said listlessly. “Do you know who Senator Dayana Prucine is?”

Beau wasn’t good at keeping up with politics. “Uh… no?”

“A huge bitch is who she is,” Nott said.

“I will not argue with this,” Caleb said with the tiniest hint of a smile. “But more importantly, she is well-known for her corruption and cruelty. We have been contracted to plant evidence to depose her.”

Beau tried not to show on her face that she liked this plan, but couldn’t help a tiny smirk. Taking down a shitty authority figure sounded like a perfect night out to her, she had to admit.

“We already got a handwriting sample from this shitty guy she was getting money from,” Jester said, pulling a sheaf of paper out of a notebook tucked into a pink backpack at her feet. “So now we just have to go plant this letter I wrote at her house!”

Beau looked at the paper. “You forged it?”

Jester stuck out her tongue. “I’m a forgery master! I used to be a spy, I’ll have you know.”

Beau tried not to let the doubt about Jester’s abilities show on her face, but she had a hard time believing that Jester’s sunny smiles could hide a talent for undercover operations.

“Don’t look at me like that!” Jester protested. “I have more years of experience than you’ve been _alive_ , technically.”

Beau rolled her eyes and looked away. Few members of this group even seemed competent. She wouldn’t question Yasha’s skills, but the rest of them seemed to barely even have any real muscle mass. Were they really trained mercenaries, or was this just an extended nightmare where she was about to get arrested alongside some idiotic cult?

“Nott and I have cased the mansion that she is staying at,” Caleb said, pulling a small tablet out of one of his dirty coat’s pockets. “It is not far from the city, so there are plenty of escape routes if things do not go as planned.”

Fjord sighed. “Probably for the best. Our plans do not have a history of going as—well, as planned. Caduceus, Caleb, you’ll stay here and keep an eye on the security systems. Jester, do you want to stay with Caduceus and the medical supplies, or—”

“I’m going in!” Jester said. “I don’t wanna stay back here and be a stupid medic. I mean—you’re not stupid, Deucey.”

“No offense taken,” rumbled Caduceus from the driver’s seat behind the van’s grate. “We’ll be there soon, so everybody get ready. I’m just going to the rendezvous spot now. This computer navigator thingy is incredible…” He chuckled, and Beau once again felt like she’d tripped and fallen into an alternate world where everyone had lost their minds.

“How good are you at being sneaky, Beau?” Jester asked.

“Decent,” Beau said, thinking back to her father’s plans. “But I’m best with my fists.”

“Well, hopefully we won’t need your brainless brawn on this one,” Molly said with an eye roll to rival her own. She narrowed her eyes at him. “No harm meant,” he said with a laugh that did not exactly assure her of his sincerity.

“Molly. Be nice.” Yasha’s voice broke through the bickering, and Molly smiled and leaned back.

“So the advance team should be—me and Fjord,” Jester said. She had leaned over Caleb’s tablet and was looking at blueprints. “And then Nott, Yasha, Beau, and Molly can come in through the back entrance while we distract the guards?”

“Works for me,” Molly said with a shrug. “Nott, you can get us in?”

“Easy-peasy,” Nott said, and when she wriggled her hands various lockpicks and pieces of scrap metal seemed to appear like magic from her sleeves.

“Perfect,” Molly said. “New girl, you’re with us.”

“Fuck you,” Beau said, but she nodded.

The van slowed to a halt, engine quieting. “We’re here,” Caduceus said. “But there’s someone outside.”

“Who—?” Fjord started to ask, but the van doors opened. A short, stout man clambered into the van.

“Ulog?” Caduceus said, turning around in the driver’s seat.

“This isn’t what we agreed on,” Molly said, eyes dark and vicious-looking suddenly.

“We work alone,” Yasha said, and Beau saw even the tough-looking new arrival start at her quiet voice. In the shadows of the van, Yasha almost could disappear even with her size, but her voice was no less utterly intimidating.

“The plan changed,” Ulog said. His voice was deep and gravelly with a slight accent. “They wanted someone to go with you who knows the territory.”

“No offense, but we don’t need you,” Nott said. “We know how to get in already. Caleb has all the schematics and everything.”

Ulog shrugged. “Leave me behind if you want, but I’ll go running straight to the front door.”

Jester crossed her arms. “Uloooog,” she said, stretching out his name. “This isn’t very nice.”

Ulog didn’t respond to Jester, but he did look at Beau. “Who’s this?” he asked, gesturing to her. “She’s not part of the plan either.”

“She’s new,” Fjord said. “Okay. Come on, we don’t want to linger out here. Ulog, you come with me and Jess. Mess up, and we’ll leave you behind. Got it?”

Ulog grinned wickedly. “Don’t worry. Won’t be a problem.”

The break-in was surprisingly easy, in Beau’s opinion. She’d never been a part of something that seemed so organized before, but the way the group responded to each other it was like they could do it with their eyes closed. “They don’t even have any roof security,” Nott said with a disappointed sigh. She muttered something into her earpiece as she began to check over the window, presumably to Caleb in the van.

Without even asking Yasha hefted Molly onto her shoulders to reach the window that Nott had scrambled up to, and then after he was in she turned to Beau. Yasha held out her arms to Beau, expression unreadable as ever.

Swallowing down whatever feelings this might give her, Beau allowed Yasha to lift her to grab onto Molly’s waiting arms outside the window. He pulled her inside, giving her a smirk that made her want to hit him, but she nobly resisted the urge. Nott gestured for Beau to hold onto Molly’s legs as he leaned over to pull Yasha in after them, and without much trouble they were all standing in the foyer.

Molly almost lost his feathery hat as he leaned out the window, but Nott snatched it. “How many times have I told you to get more practical infiltration gear,” she hissed. He replaced it lazily with a smile.

The house was all minimalist bullshit, in Beau’s opinion—seating that barely looked like furniture, much less looking comfortable. She could’ve pulled the whole area out of a magazine catalogue, and she could see a pool glimmering on the exterior through a glass wall. It reminded her too much of her father’s house for comfort.

She was brought back to the present moment by Molly waving his hand obnoxiously in front of her face. He motioned for her to follow them, and in only a few moments they were inside a bedroom with the bed in the dead center of the room. “Ugh,” Molly said. “What kind of monster doesn’t have their bed against at least one wall?”

She snorted involuntarily, and then glared at him to make up for it.

Nott scampered in. She pulled a painting off the wall, revealing a safe behind it, and quickly entered the combination. Molly gave her a pat on the shoulder, and she glared at him.

“Just because Caleb and I don’t do all of our work at the last minute,” she said with a huff. She placed Jester’s forged letter inside and quickly replaced the safe door and painting.

“That’s it?” Beau said.

“Don’t jinx us,” Nott hissed.

Beau shrugged. If this was how all their missions went, she didn’t know if she thought they were good strategists or just massively lucky idiots.

“I think my earpiece is busted,” Nott said quietly, pulling it out to check on it. “I’m only getting static.” She put it back in, but frowned in disappointment. “Caleb? Hello?”

“Let’s keep moving,” Yasha said quietly.

They made their way back down the hall. “Hurry,” Molly said. “Jester and Fjord’s distraction is probably about over by now. And god knows what Ulog’s up to.”

“What did they—?” Beau started to ask, but she was distracted by a loud crashing sound from the main door.

“Get these people off my property!” came a shrill woman’s voice. “What do I _hire_ you people for?”

“Please, ma’am, won’t you hear the good word—” came Jester’s voice, pleading, from the doorway.

“OUT!” declared the woman, and there was the sound of the door slamming. Nott, Molly, Yasha, and Beau remained frozen by the stairs, only feet away from their window escape—but those feet were in full view of the front door.

“She’s not supposed to be here…!” Nott whispered.

“Well, _she is_ ,” Molly snapped back in a whisper.

Beau looked around. _Exit, exit, exit_ …

Before they even had a chance to move, the woman’s voice emerged again. “Who are you?”

They all whipped around, sure they’d been spotted. In the dark of their hallway, Beau could only barely see the figure of presumably Senator Prucine by the door. She hadn’t even turned any lights on yet.

“You don’t remember me?” came a gravelly voice that Beau recognized as Ulog.

She saw Molly pinch his nose in frustration in her peripheral vision.

Yasha drew her huge sword out very slowly from under her long cloak. Molly rearranged his colorful coat to reveal dual scimitars at his hips. Nott pulled a pistol out of a holster under her jacket. Beau clenched her fists. She might not have the same degree of weaponry as the rest of them, but she was certainly ready to throw down if need be.

“What are you doing in my home? Help—!” Prucine began to call out, but she was silenced by fear as Ulog ran straight up to her, pulling a blade out and pressing it to her throat.

“Fuck,” Molly let out under his breath. Before Beau could throw out an arm to stop him, he stepped out from the shadows. “Let her go,” he said to Ulog. Yasha stepped out beside him as Nott disappeared into the shadows, leaving Beau unsure as to where she had gone.

“She’s the reason my wife is in prison,” Ulog said. “She destroyed our lives! Just because she could!”

“We’re not here to kill her,” Molly said in a placating tone, hands outstretched. “Come on. Put that down.”

Ulog looked at him, face softening just a tiny bit. With the distraction this gave, Prucine suddenly pushed back against him, knocking the knife to the ground as she began to scramble for the door.

Ulog leaped after her, but with a sound like a crack he crumpled to the ground. There was a bullet wound in his shin, and Beau spotted Nott fade back into the shadows. Prucine began to struggle with the door, fear stopping her shaking hands from working effectively.

“You’ve left me no choice,” Ulog said, face contorted with rage and pain. “Sorry.”

He pulled something out of his coat, and before Beau even had a chance to take more than a step towards him, the world exploded around her.

Waking up to the feeling of your flesh slowly inching its way back together was an experience she could live without, Beau decided, feeling her fingers twitch as they found themselves once more attached to her hand. She coughed, curling up into a ball as her lungs realized they worked again.

She sat up. The structural integrity of the mansion still seemed to be intact, but the charred and split bodies near the door indicated the same was not true for Prucine or Ulog. She saw Molly and Yasha crawling slowly towards her, and a groan from nearby indicated Nott was in the process of re-forming as well.

“Fucking fuck,” Molly said eloquently.

“We need to leave,” Yasha said. “We don’t know how long we’ve been out. The police are going to be on their way.”

They could hear raised voices outside, but a huge beam had fallen to block the door.

The four of them staggered over to their window escape and made a much less graceful exit than their entrance had been, just letting themselves topple out the window. It didn’t really matter if they made noise now. As they quickly made their way through the woods back towards the van, Beau felt the last of the pain and fatigue leave her form, although the state of her clothes clearly showed the fatal experience they’d just been through.

The van slowly came into view in the dark night, and as they approached Caleb threw open the back door. “Nott!” he called out worriedly. Jester and Fjord were right behind him.

“I’m fine, Caleb!” she called back.

Caduceus opened the driver’s door. “Everyone okay?”

“Except for Ulog,” Molly said bitterly. “Shit went massively sideways. Let’s talk on the go.”

They piled inside, and the van peeled away into the night, the sound of sirens beginning to echo in the distance.

“We’ve got to get off the streets,” Nott said, Caleb fussing over her in the dim light as the sun began to rise.

Molly was examining the tattered remains of his colorful coat, frowning.

“Well, the sewer escape was our plan B,” Fjord offered.

“I’m on my way,” Caduceus said. “We should be near an entrance in a few minutes.”

“…The sewer?” Beau said, eyebrow twitching.

“It’s not that bad, Beau,” Jester said. “We can get to our safehouse from there! New clothes and a hot shower,” she said, eyes lighting up at the prospect.

“Please, God,” Molly said, leaning his head back against the wall. Yasha let out a very small chuckle.

As promised, it wasn’t long before the van was hastily parked on a side street in what looked to Beau like a dead end on the edge of Los Angeles. She’d never spent much time in the city, but this didn’t look like a particularly interesting part of town.

Nott was already working on a manhole cover nearby as the rest of them piled out of the van, keeping an eye out for any overly early-rising members of this suburban block. Jester and Yasha quickly pulled off the license plates from the van like they’d done it a million times before.

Yasha didn’t even need to do anything more than flex to rip the plate off, and Beau certainly didn’t stare as she did so.

“Got it,” Nott said, pulling the cover up with Fjord and Caleb’s help. “C’mon.”

The eight of them quickly descended into the earth, and Beau was relieved to see that this tunnel at least was relatively dry. The air was warm and stale-smelling, but it was better than it could have been.

They began to trek inward, and Beau didn’t even have the energy to ask where they were going. Jester was humming something that sounded suspiciously like “99 Bottles of Beer” under her breath, and Caleb was locked in an intense conversation with Nott towards the back. Fjord and Caduceus kept the lead, Caduceus’s keen eyes scanning their environment.

Yasha walked nearby Beau, and Beau subtly adjusted her pace to keep time with the taller woman.

“You did well,” Yasha said.

“Oh—uh—thank you,” Beau said, telling herself that she was absolutely not blushing. “You, uh, did too. I mean, you know that. But it’s true.” She laughed, wishing she could disappear into the earth beneath their feet as they walked.

“Um… thank you,” Yasha said. Beau suddenly found the cave ceiling to be incredibly fascinating, and stared up at it determinedly.

“So, uh, where you from?” Beau asked.

“Norway,” Yasha said. “Long time ago.”

“Oh, sweet,” Beau said. “I’ve never been there.”

“I have not been there in a long time,” Yasha responded. Beau, little tact as she possessed, sensed that this was not a subject that Yasha enjoyed talking about. She cast her mind around for a different subject desperately.

“Oh! Oh! Are we revealing our _secrets?”_ Jester said, poking her head between Beau and Yasha and causing Beau to jump in surprise at her loud voice.

“Shh,” Caduceus said mildly, turning around with a finger to his lips and a calm smile on his face.

“Sorry,” Jester said in a stage whisper. “Come on, Beau, you have to be curious, right?”

“I guess,” Beau said. She wanted to say that she still didn’t believe them, but it was getting to the point where she felt like being skeptical was actually making her feel more stupid than believing them. It was hard to think someone was lying to you about impossible truths after you watched their body reform through an explosion.

“I’m the youngest,” Jester said. “Well, except for you! Yay! Not the baby anymore!”

“I’m no baby,” Beau said.

“Oh, of course you aren’t,” Jester said patronizingly, patting Beau on the shoulder. “C’mon! Don’t you wanna know my backstory—?”

“Wait,” hissed Fjord. The group all stopped and Jester made a zipping motion across her mouth. “Cad, did you hear…?”

“Someone is here,” Caduceus said very quietly.

Like in the mansion, Beau saw everyone reach for their weapons. Jester pulled a surprisingly large axe out of her pink backpack with a practiced motion, and Fjord revealed a strange-looking sword on his belt under the long coat he wore. To her shock, the reedy-looking Caleb pulled what looked like _an actual flamethrower_ to his chest.

“Who’s there?” Caduceus called out. “We can hear you.”

There was a long pause, the air around them all incredibly tense.

A man stepped out around an upcoming corner. He was tall, with long platinum blonde hair pulled back into a bun. “Hello,” he said with a slight accent Beau didn’t recognize.

Fjord frowned, sword still clenched tightly in his hand. “Hello,” he responded. “State your business.”

“I am sorry for alarming you,” the man said. “I’ve been sent by a mutual friend to speak with you.”

Caleb stepped forward, brow furrowed. “Who might this friend be?” he asked, voice quiet but sharp.

“Our friendly company hasn’t been very reliable of late,” Molly said with a bitter chuckle.

The man looked them over, eyes catching on the tattered clothing of those who had been caught in the blast. “Yes, I’m aware of recent events. My employer, however, suspects he has a proposition you’ll be interested in, in spite of this.”

“Hey! Have you been watching us?” Jester said, pointing at him like she was scolding a spoiled child. Several of the group exchanged worried looks. “Are you going to tell us who your employer _is_ , or not?” she continued.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude,” the man said. “The Shadowhand is looking for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you all are enjoying so far, I love hearing from you! and thanks eternally to my beta comfortcharacters <3


	5. Interlude - Fjord

Every time Fjord closed his eyes and breathed deeply, the smell of the sea came back to him. The brisk, salty air of his seaside hometown. The sun-bleached decks of his first ship. The way the winds turned tense and bitter when a storm was coming. He felt like those memories were with him always.

The coast in California was objectively nothing like the one where he’d grown up, but essentially, in Fjord’s mind, all the coasts of the world were the same, so close to these huge natural forces that they had no hope of understanding or controlling. He knew this better than most.

Although he hadn’t returned to England since the end of the sixteenth century, Fjord had grown up in the city of Plymouth. The city’s life had revolved around the ocean, and so in his childhood, so had Fjord’s. He’d never known his parents, so the most nostalgic memories he could conjure were of his time by the English coast. It was a bustling center of maritime trade, so ships coming in and out of the harbor was a daily occurrence if not an hourly one.

Fjord spent many hours as a child perched on the edge of the docks, dragging his toes through the water and watching the occasional fish swim by the surface. As soon as he was old enough to leave on his own, the seaside became his real home—more his home than the orphanage, with the cruel children and overseers who never really looked at him.

The sailors who ruffled his hair and joked that he must be a spirit of the sea were more his family than the staff who only ever called him “Stone,” like an unwanted piece of rubble cast aside by his parents.

When it all got to be too much, he knew he could always go and wade into the shallow water, feel it swirl around him, and breathe in that salty air and feel a part of something greater than himself.

Fjord didn’t wait to be old enough to leave the orphanage to get on a ship and go. He swabbed the decks and manned the pumps, hopping from ship to ship when offered a farthing more than at his last job. He became anonymous, just one of many poor kids working for their living on the sea.

When he met Vandran, things were different. He had been of course hearing the rumors of Queen Elizabeth’s sanctioned privateers, but this was the first time he’d encountered one in person. That felt like more than working to survive—the privateers were impressive, uniformed, intimidating figures. Fjord felt inadequate next to them, but also desperate to join their ranks.

The image of the sun-tanned man, hair in a thick beard and captain’s hat perched on his head, had instantly recalled in Fjord’s mind the images of the sailors who’d been kind to him in his childhood. Vandran’s face wasn’t quite world-weary, but it had the mark of someone who had seen their share of excitement and would brave much more.

Fjord hadn’t considered himself much of a people person before that moment, but he knew an opportunity when he saw one. He sat down next to Vandran at the bar, bought him a drink with the last of his coin, and asked if Vandran needed an extra hand on his ship. Vandran had clapped him on the back and taken him on.

Unlike the previous ships Fjord had been on, he wasn’t anonymous on the Tide’s Breath. Vandran had taken notice of his bold entrance and trained him in some of the higher-level work necessary for the Queen’s privateer fleet. He taught Fjord how to speak in a such a way that people had no choice but to listen, and although Fjord had been all right in a scrap since his teens, Vandran taught him how to truly fight. He often went to his cot bruised and sunburned, but he felt like for the first time in his life, someone was seeing his abilities.

Vandran was by his side when they took on their first pirate ship, and under his guidance Fjord clamped down on the fear in his chest and put on a menacing mask. He hoped Vandran couldn’t see any of the cracks in this confident mask when the crews leapt from one ship to the other and he was faced with the possibility of his own death. Fjord, in a desperate moment of self-defense, skewered a man through the chest when he was cornered by the door to the hold. As the man crumpled before him, a few drops of blood spraying onto Fjord’s face, he felt like all the air was gone from his lungs.

Vandran found him like that after the battle was over, leaning back against the wall and breathing heavily. Vandran chuckled at the man dead before him, pulled the sword out of his chest and handed it back to Fjord. As Fjord’s awareness started to return to him, Vandran told him he’d finally become a man.

Vandran continued to teach him swordplay and at times, even seemed like he thought Fjord might have an officer’s position on the ship someday. The two of them didn’t talk much, but Vandran always looked straight at him when they encountered each other, and never called him Stone. Fjord wondered sometimes if this was what having a father was like.

There was one aspect of the ship that marred the joy that Fjord was feeling for the first time in his life. Sabian was on the ship too, much to Fjord’s displeasure. The two of them had worked on many of the same assignments over the years, trading employment at the same ports and then glaring with displeasure when they found themselves once more on the same ship. There was something about the furrowing of the other man’s brow that reminded Fjord all too well of the children at the orphanage.

So he wasn’t surprised when Sabian had seen the same opportunity with the Tide’s Breath that Fjord had, although he couldn’t help the smirk that crossed his face when Vandran devoted more of his limited time to Fjord than to his crewmate. Sabian never seemed to care much, devoting most of his time to working in the hold. Fjord never saw much of him on the ship, and started to believe that whatever conflicts they’d had in the past might be over now that they were both older and wiser.

One day, after another successful confrontation with a particularly vicious group of pirates, Fjord had been sent to fetch Sabian to talk to the captain. He convinced himself it wasn’t jealously that motivated the anger in his steps as he made his way down to the bowels of the ship.

“Sabian?” Fjord called out. This area of the ship was unusually dark for there to be someone working there, but he knew that this was where Sabian had been assigned for the day. He turned a corner, peering into the darkness, and he saw a crouching figure.

“Sabian, Captain—” he began to say, and the figure looked up with an expression of alarm. It was Sabian, but there was rage in his features that Fjord had never known.

In his hands, Fjord could see what looked like some kind of fuse. He was no fool. Whatever Sabian was doing, it was dangerous and destructive. Sabian was sabotaging the ship. He moved to take a step backwards, to reach for his sword, to—

Before he even had the chance to take another step, Sabian was at his throat. He had never known Sabian was such a capable fighter, but as his throat clenched with fear he felt a pain he’d never known before. He clutched for his throat as the bloody dagger in Sabian’s hand slashed across it, leaving him choking.

He crumpled to his knees and fell backwards, horrible gurgling noises coming out of his mouth as he felt blood spray out of his slashed throat. He wondered if this was how the men he’d cut down had felt as they watched their own life flow from their bodies. As he choked and faded on the ground, he saw Sabian step over him as he continued whatever work he was doing. Fjord tried to grasp the hilt of his sword, but his limbs weren’t working. With a final wet gasp, Fjord died. It was sudden, brutal, and violent—the way he’d always imagined going out, if anyone would have asked him, but no less unpleasant.

Slightly more unexpected was when he opened his eyes a few minutes later. He sat up in a rush, hands clasping his throat. Sabian and the fuse were nowhere to be seen. Had he collapsed and had a nightmare? But when he looked down at his shirt and the wood around where he had been lying, it was covered in semi-dried blood, still sticky to the touch.

Fjord lurched to his feet and ran for the deck. As he ran, he felt the ship lurch under him, and he stumbled in a way he rarely did after years at sea. He felt moved by panic and desperation. He had to find Vandran, find Sabian, stop whatever was about to happen to the ship that might as well have been his home.

When he reached the deck, he saw the extent of the terrible storm that was raging around him. Wind and cold rain whipped at his face, and he could barely see the other end of the deck from where he stood. He could just barely make out a dark figure on the opposite end, and as he began to sprint for them through the power of the storm, the explosion started.

Fjord was tossed from the deck as easily as a leaf falls from a tree, thrown into the black waters with a painful smash. He felt himself sinking, pulled down by the rubble from the ship, and he desperately reached for the surface but could not escape its grasp. Around him he saw pieces of the ship crashing into the water, as well as what looked like bodies. He tried not to look too closely.

Fjord felt his vision fading, unimaginable pain building in his chest as his lungs longed for air. He thrashed, desperate to reach the sky, but it seemed so far away. Even the sound of the storm was muffled now. As he reached with the last of his strength, his vision faded for the second time in only a few minutes.

When he awoke again, he was floating on his stomach in the water, and he quickly flipped over. The feeling of air filling his lungs, even as the storm continued to whip the air around him, was the most wonderful thing he’d ever felt in his life.

The next few weeks were a blur. He floated on a piece of driftwood with no food, no water. More than once, his pain faded away completely as he felt the breath leave his body. But only a few minutes after he drifted off he was brought rudely back to reality, feeling physically better but in the same predicament. This was more proof if he had even needed it. Somehow, Fjord could not die.

This thought did not bring him much comfort, even as he eventually washed up on the shore. He dragged himself out of the water with no one alive who would have mourned him and no place in the world to go.

He did resolve to one thing, though. Before he’d been thrown from the ship, he had seen that dark figure dive overboard—suicidal in such a storm, but perhaps not if the person had planned their escape beforehand. He needed to find Sabian. It took years, but Fjord no longer aged. When he finally darkened Sabian’s doorstep, he knew he must have seemed like a nightmare come to life for the other man, like a vengeful spirit who hadn’t aged a day.

Fjord didn’t like to think about what had happened that day, but he knew Sabian would do no more harm.

A more shocking discovery had come years later. Fjord had resolved to leave England as the turn of the century approached. He’d continued to hop from ship to ship, doing some legitimate work and some illegitimate, but he was beginning to worry that someone might take notice of him.

While traveling through various tropical islands with a pirate crew, Fjord saw a man in the distance who looked very familiar. He approached from a distance, keeping himself hidden from the man’s line of sight. As he drew close, he saw him. His blonde beard had turned white and straggly, and his skin was even darker from the sun than it had been on the Tide’s Breath, but Vandran lived. The old man was alone on that beach, sipping a drink calmly as he watched the ocean.

Fjord didn’t call out to him.

He traveled all over Europe by sea, and then expanded his horizons and traveled to the British colonies in the New World when they finally came to be. The sea had always been where he was at his most comfortable, so he kept moving.

As he explored this new nation as it grew and changed, he found himself consciously changing his own voice. He used it at first to be more domineering and persuasive, but after some time he realized that he was simply trying to sound more like Vandran used to. Like a leader should.

He didn’t know why, but he didn’t dream of the others for many years, or if he had, he couldn’t remember it. His dreams were often plagued with sinking ships and falling bodies, after all.

It was a few decades into the twentieth century by the time he remembered one of his dreams of the others. A language he didn’t recognize, and a battlefield which he could easily locate. So he traveled back to the continent of his birth and met Jester Lavorre, a woman who would have changed his life even if she hadn’t been like him.

Fjord traveled with her for some time before Caduceus found them, and with him he brought the others. He could hardly believe he’d been alone for so long when the rest had always existed. There was certainly some conflict between them at first, but over time he grew to trust them. For the first time in his life, Fjord had his own crew—his own family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to comfortcharacters!! also, I've done research but if you notice any glaring historical accuracies please lmk, I'm not an expert by any means :D
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! This one kind of got away from me but in a good way.


	6. Chapter 6

“Someone mind telling me what the fuck that was about?” Beau said as the group climbed in through the basement entrance of the Mighty Nein’s safehouse. She could hardly believe they had a secret entrance tucked away in _the sewers,_ but she supposed if they’d been alive as long as they said they would have had time to set some things up. “Who’s _the Shadowhand?_ Are we gonna have some trouble coming our way?”

“No worries, Beau!” Jester said, dusting off her clothes as she finished climbing up. “It’s just Caleb’s friend Essek. He’s a little shady but it’s okay, he likes us.”

“Ja,” Caleb said. “He is not like us, but he holds considerable power within a few underground organizations. We have done a job for him in the past.”

Molly frowned. “I know we like the guy, but we have a pact,” he said in a sharp tone. “We don’t do more than one job for anyone. We don’t want them to get close enough to realize what we are.”

“Still, he’s been good to us,” Fjord said. “We should at least hear him out.” Caduceus nodded.

Beau quirked an eyebrow. “Doesn’t that sound like the exact kind of situation you’d want to avoid?”

Molly nodded. “As much as I hate agreeing with our new lackey, I have to say that she’s right. We might be letting our emotions blind us on this one.”

“But Mollyyyy,” Jester protested. “It’s _Essek._ I wanna see him!”

“If Caleb wants go, we should go,” Nott chimed in.

Caleb seemed to consider their words. “I do not want to put us at risk,” he finally said. “But I would like to see him if we are able.”

“Then it’s settled!” Nott declared.

Molly shrugged. “Your funeral,” he said. “But I’ll come with, of course. What’s life without a little risk?”

Beau sighed. She ran a hand through her hair, and when it came back dusty with particles of debris, she remembered what they’d come here for. “Does anyone have some clothes I could take?” she asked. “I didn’t exactly prep for being exploded when you _kidnapped me.”_

“Oh, come on, you’re getting to like us,” Molly said.

“You can borrow some of my gym clothes if you want,” Fjord said. “I, uh, don’t use ‘em much.”

She gave the man a look from head to toe. “Oh, really?” she said in a tone that was aiming for sincere but almost certainly fell short.

“Beau!” Jester said in a scandalized tone. “Fjord, don’t worry. I can be the muscle for both of us, it is fine.”

Fjord laughed, taking the ribbing good-naturedly. “C’mon Beau, I’ll show you around.”

The two of them walked down the hall together, Fjord pointing to everyone’s rooms and showing her their guest room. Beau nodded, only half paying attention.

“Beau?” Fjord said, breaking her out of her reverie. “I just wanted to say I’m glad you came with us, even if it wasn’t entirely of your own accord. Everyone’s found their place here, and I know you will too. They may be a bunch of assholes, but it’s a good group.”

“Good thing I’m an asshole too,” Beau said. But she gave Fjord a real smile. She whacked him on the back in what was supposed to be a gesture of camaraderie, but he winced. “Oops.”

Fjord grinned. “You’ll fit right in, then.” He handed her the pile of clothes he’d gathered. “Be in the living room in a few. Family meeting.”

Beau felt much better after a hot shower, wearing Fjord’s t-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts. She rolled up the sleeves of the shirt to free up her movement even further, and stretched, letting her hair out of its ponytail while it dried.

As she walked down the hall, Yasha walked into the hall. Beau stopped stock-still in her tracks when she realized that Yasha had clearly just stepped out of the shower and was wearing only a towel.

Beau chuckled nervously and moved back, not wanting to make Yasha uncomfortable, but Yasha approached her instead. “Hey, Yasha,” she said, aiming for casual and staring at Yasha’s face directly.

“Hello,” Yasha said. “I just wanted to—make sure you are feeling okay. This is a lot.”

“Um, yeah, I’m okay,” Beau said. “I mean—it is. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s not really registering, but I’m just going with the flow right now. I guess I have time to get used to it.”

“Yes,” Yasha said, tone completely serious. “You will have lots of time. You can get used to… a lot of things. With a lot of time.” She seemed to run out of words and stopped.

“Uh, thank you,” Beau said. “I, um—thank you for checking in. You—I appreciate it. Thanks.”

“Yes,” Yasha said awkwardly, and then walked on down the hall.

Beau let out a deep breath and hoped her blush wasn’t showing too furiously on her face. She walked a little further down the hall, trying to recall the path Fjord had showed her to the living room.

“Hey, asshole,” Beau heard from over her shoulder. She turned to see Molly poking his head out of a doorway in the hall, wearing nothing but a blanket loosely wrapped around his hips. She groaned.

“I promise you, not interested,” she said, turning away.

Molly barked out a laugh. “Don’t make me laugh. Never in a million years—and I mean that. No, I wanted to talk to you for a second. Come here.”

Beau reluctantly made her way back over to his door, and he walked inside. She followed.

“I just wanted to say…” Molly took a deep breath, as if steeling himself. “I am sorry about asking Yasha to stab you in the hospital. That was not very welcoming behavior, I’ve been informed.”

Beau rolled her eyes. “I think we’re past it,” she said. “And I don’t need Jester’s apology through you, thanks.”

Molly spluttered. “Excuse you, I decided to apologize of my own good will!”

Beau laughed. “Sure. Don’t worry about it, dickhead.”

“Bitch,” Molly said, nodding in response. Beau ducked out of the room before he could take the lapse in conversation to start stripping in front of her.

As she made her way to the living room, the rest of the group started slowly filing in. Fjord stood up after the whole group reunited in the small, cozy space. Jester was playing with a small weasel that Beau was beginning to suspect had been hiding in her hood the entire time.

“So, Essek wants to talk to us,” Fjord said. “His contact said he’s in Vegas, so I guess that’s where we’re headed?”

“Vegas! Vegas! Vegas!” Jester chanted, cheering.

“Jester, you don’t even drink,” Nott said. “Or gamble."

“Doesn’t mean it won’t be fuuun,” Jester trilled.

“Sounds good to me,” Beau said. “Are we driving? We ditched the van.”

“Oh believe me, that’s not our only van,” Nott assured her.

“We practically have a fleet at this point!” Jester said with a giggle.

Fjord cleared his throat. “We don’t know exactly where he is, so I guess we just go to Las Vegas and wait for him to contact us.”

Jester gasped in excitement. “So… we actually can just go hang out in Vegas! Oh my gosh!”

Molly grinned. “Forget my reservations. This sounds like my kind of job already. Beau—drinking contest. Lock it in.”

Beau gave him a skeptical look. “You really think you can keep up with me? I partied with military brats for four years. I’m practically immune to alcohol poisoning. And now I guess I’m literally immune.”

Molly locked eyes with her and smiled menacingly. “I out-drank Hemingway and out-fucked Byron. Don’t underestimate me.”

Nott stuck out her tongue. “Gross,” she declared. “But if we’re doing a drinking contest, I’m in.”

“Oof, it’s off then,” Molly said in a tragic tone. “No one can outdrink Nott. That’s just scientific fact.”

“Hey!”

The group started to squabble, and Beau surprised herself at the fond smile that she had to wipe off of her face. She’d barely known them for a day, but there was a warmth to this group she kept underestimating.

After sleeping for most of the day—Fjord had decided they had better travel at night, especially after what had just happened—the group set off in early evening in a new van. This one seemed to be a little more homey than the other, with knick-knacks of each of the members strewn about the floor. Caleb was quickly wrapped up in a book, and Beau leaned over to him.

“Whatcha reading?” she said.

“Ooh, is it porn?” Jester said. When Beau shot her an amused look, she gave a serious one back. “He likes the _educational_ smut,” Jester said in a stage whisper.

“It is nonfiction,” Caleb began. “The history of—”

“History?” Jester said. “That’s boring. Why do you have to read about that? Didn’t you live through it?”

“One perspective is not nearly enough,” Caleb began. “I like to see the perspectives of others.” As Jester turned away to someone else, complaining all the way, he said in an undertone to Beau, “I like to see if they get anything wrong.”

Beau snorted, and she saw Nott looking at her approvingly. Although they seemed of similar ages, she couldn’t quite figure out the relationship between the two of them.

“How long have you two known each other?” she asked.

“It has been a little while,” Caleb said.

Nott laughed. “Yes, a little hundred years or so. We met each other before the rest of the group.”

“Where did you meet?” Beau asked.

“Oh, a jail,” Caleb said with a hand wave. “It’s not important.”

“So mysterious,” cooed Jester from Fjord’s shoulder. “Don’t let them scare you, Beau, they’re softies.”

Beau shrugged. “Not much scares me,” she responded. She wasn’t about to interrogate someone, and besides, she didn’t really care that much.

“Yes, I’m beginning to get that,” Fjord said with a grin.

Beau leaned back with a smirk. Suddenly, a dinging sound came from Caleb’s bag, and he rifled around in it to retrieve his precious tablet, wrapped in its own case. She was beginning to notice the way he treated that thing like a precious artifact.

“It’s a message from Essek’s people through one of our addresses,” Caleb said. “Not traceable,” he said to Beau. “We have a lot of them.”

“What’s it say?” Fjord asked.

“He wishes to meet with us the night after this one. He’s sent us an address.” Caleb fiddled with the tablet a little. “Not too far from our safehouse north of the city. We can stay there tonight.”

“After we _party_ ,” Jester said.

“After we party,” Caleb conceded.

After parking the van in a run-down looking alleyway—Nott assured Beau that the locks on the van were no joke—the party headed into downtown Las Vegas. Beau still felt like she was shaking off the sleepiness of the day, especially since it was already late into the night, but the bright lights and neon colors were enough to give anyone a little energy, and the dry heat seeped into her bones. There were people lining every corner, dressed to the nines or barely dressed at all.

Jester had insisted that Beau wear one of her dresses, and Beau had reluctantly shed Fjord’s gym clothes for a red dress. Beau hadn’t thought to pack for nightlife, but as the rest of them dug through their bags she realized they’d all brought a change of clothes. Beau wouldn’t normally be caught dead in a dress like that, but somehow Jester was a very hard person to say no to. Besides, even she could admit that basketball shorts weren’t exactly club attire, and she wasn’t about to miss out on a night of drinking with wild abandon just because she couldn’t get past the bouncer.

Molly breezed through the streets like he’d lived there his entire life. He’d exchanged his colorful coat and hat for a bare-chested tuxedo with an actual cloak attached at the shoulder. Caleb and Fjord were wearing more normal suits, and Jester and Nott were wearing similarly cut dresses in pink and yellow. Caduceus wore a minty-green tailcoat which looked out of place in the twenty-first century, but, Beau supposed, that made sense. When she’d seen Yasha pull out a long black dress, Beau had to gulp and look away, and she was still avoiding eye contact at all costs.

As Molly inspected the various clubs, looking for something that met whatever his mysterious criteria were, Beau turned and accidentally found herself face-to-face with the woman that she’d just been focusing on avoiding. She wasn’t gonna make it weird. But as she looked at Yasha’s form standing tall over her, long black sleeves not hiding considerable muscle, she stammered to think of something to say.

“Y-you look great,” Beau gasped out. That was it. This woman was trying to kill her.

“Thank you,” Yasha said. “Would you like this?” She was holding a piece of fabric in her hands, and as Beau took it she realized it was a black blazer. Although Beau didn’t usually stand for sleeves, it would be nice to have something that would make her outfit feel a little more sturdy than Jester’s dress.

“Thanks,” Beau said, genuinely touched. She hadn’t even seen Yasha take it out. She slipped it on over the dress and buttoned it, feeling more secure.

Yasha leaned over her and Beau froze. Yasha gently pulled some of Beau’s hair, which she had let down for the occasion, out from under the blazer’s collar in the back. Beau didn’t breathe as Yasha’s hand ghosted over her face as she retreated.

“Um,” Yasha said, and Beau was sure for a second that she saw the giant of a woman blushing. But that couldn’t be right. “Sorry. Your hair was stuck.”

“Uh, thank you,” Beau stammered, sanity returning slowly.

“ _Yes!_ This one!” Molly declared, pointing at a venue that to Beau looked identical to all the others. “Nott, do you remember when we came here in the eighties?”

Nott frowned, looking at the club. “Um, no?”

Molly grinned. “Perfect. Any night you don’t remember is good enough for me.”

It didn’t take much time for the bouncer to allow the unusual group in—although, as Beau looked around, she had to admit they didn’t seem much weirder than anyone else inside. Beau was not used to being among other people who stood out. Usually, she had to do the standing out all on her own. It was comforting, in a way, not that she’d ever admit it—like the presence of others was a shield between her and the watchful, judging eyes of the world.

Molly used a wicked smile and a wink to get them all a round of drinks almost immediately—whether the bartender was threatened or charmed, Beau wasn’t sure. Jester ordered milk for herself and Caduceus, and although the bartender gave her a puzzled look, she was happily nursing a small glass before long. The place was actually a little tamer than she’d expected. There was a pounding beat and a dancefloor filled with churning bodies, but a lot of people inside seemed a little bit on the older side for the party scene and there were a lot of sit-down tables.

It seemed like a slightly more aged establishment—which she, again, realized made a lot of sense. Maybe someday she’d stop being surprised by the fact that she was essentially surrounded by a bunch of senior citizens (at least), no matter how much skin they were flashing.

Molly grinned at her. “We’re not _that_ old,” he said, as if he could read her mind. She scoffed. He cocked his head to the side. “Okay, you’re on, motherfucker,” he said with a dangerous smile. “Drinking contest.”

“I thought you said you wouldn’t compete with me,” screeched Nott, who was already making her way through her second drink even though they’d barely been inside two minutes.

“I’m not competing against you,” Molly said. He pointed at a table where a group sat, playing some kind of card game. “I want to compete with them.”

Nott grinned. “Not exactly fair,” she said.

Caleb, perhaps already a little tipsy, showed a rare small smile. “When have we cared about fair?”

“Who’s in?” Molly asked. “Me, Beau, Nott—Fjord?” he asked.

Fjord nodded with a rueful grin. “Why not,” he said.

Molly nudged Caleb. “You seem like you’re in a good mood, Mr. Widogast,” he said. “You want to try your luck?”

Caleb raised an eyebrow at Molly. “I was raised on beer for breakfast,” he said.

Molly laughed. “Okay, five of them, five of us. Let’s go meet our challengers.”

The group made their way over to the other table. The group of drinkers looked up as their unusual party approached, Molly and his cape leading the way. Before they could say a word, Molly slammed down a pile of cash on the table. Beau couldn’t tell how much it was, but it was more than the few coins on the table that this group was playing cards for.

“Drinking contest?” Molly said without prelude.

The oldest man at the table, who had a large scar over his face and a salt-and-pepper beard, looked up at Molly with a glare. Before Beau could pull Molly back so he wouldn’t get punched, however, the glare split into an amused grin.

“You’re on,” the man said, sweeping the cards off the table. “I was losin’ anyway.”

“Blemmy,” complained the youngest man at the table, but they were all smiling now. Beau had to grudgingly admit that Molly had a good eye for other people—or at least was very lucky.

“What are you old-timers doing in here?” Molly asked as he pulled up a chair.

“Shut up and drink,” Blemmy said. As if it was expected, someone was already on their way over with a tray full of shots.

“Do this a lot?” Fjord asked.

“More than you,” a tough-looking woman at the table responded with a grin.

“Oh, do not underestimate us,” Caleb said. “We call her the Bottomless Pit,” he said, gesturing at Nott.

“Who’s up first?” Molly said.

“How about you, peacock man?” Another man at the table spoke. He wore an ill-fitting suit and had slicked-back hair, but his smile wasn’t malicious.

Molly gave him a pleased smile. “Oh, I love that. Let’s drink to it.” The two of them lifted their shot glasses, nodding to each other, and began downing them. Beau had to admit she was impressed by the speed with which Molly could down each shot, and she’d already lost count after a few seconds.

The other man was keeping up well enough at first, but his bloodshot eyes started blinking a little too fast after a few glasses were upside down on the table. Beau grimaced and looked away as he began to retch into his hands as Molly put down his glass with a self-satisfied smile. “One to the peacock man,” Molly said.

“I’ll give it a shot,” said a woman with two braids and freckles.

“You’re on,” Beau said, not one to be outdone.

As Beau started downing shots, one after another, she felt like she was doing pretty well. Then she looked up to see the woman several glasses ahead of her, smirking.

Molly laughed. “Looks like someone’s all talk,” he said mockingly to Beau.

“Fuck you,” Beau said, downing another few shots, but before she could help it a cough came crashing up her throat and she spit vodka and saliva onto the table. Everyone leaned away, groaning.

Molly clicked his tongue. “It’s okay, you’ll understand when you’re older.”

Beau growled and found her way to the bathroom, world spinning a little bit. As she wiped her face off in front of the grimy mirror, she saw Jester emerge from a stall.

“Hey Beau! How’s the contest going?” she asked.

Beau groaned. Jester laughed. “That well, huh? Do you wanna come dance with me and Caduceus and Yasha instead?”

Beau nodded wordlessly, and Jester dragged her along. As she passed the table with the contest, she saw Nott wordlessly throwing back shot after shot after shot, Blemmy desperately attempting to keep up with a wide-eyed stare.

Molly saluted her as she passed, and she flipped him off.

Jester tugged her over to their small dance circle on the corner of the floor. Beau, feeling fairly unsteady, let Jester twirl around her as she swayed in place—half because of the music, half because of all of the shots catching up with her very quickly.

After another few minutes, they were joined by the rest of the Mighty Nein. Molly swept Nott into a dance, drunk on their victory—and on the many, many drinks. Caleb very politely asked Jester to dance with him, and left Beau was wondering if she was seeing things as they started doing a classical waltz to the pounding club music beat.

Fjord and Caduceus appeared deep in conversation against the wall. Beau looked around for the last remaining member of their group, feeling fuzzy.

“…Would you like to dance with me?” Yasha said, seemingly appearing out of nowhere to extend a hand. Beau looked up at her, face flushed from alcohol and heat from the other dancers.

“Yeah,” Beau said breathlessly.

Beau wasn’t sure what style of dance Yasha was doing, but she let the taller woman lead her as they moved around the floor. It was definitely a little old-fashioned for the situation, but when Yasha dipped Beau elegantly, she found she didn’t mind at all. Beau wondered if Yasha could feel her heart pounding. Their bodies were so close together.

“I haven’t danced with anyone in a long time,” Yasha said very quietly in Beau’s ear as they spun around together.

“How long?” Beau asked.

“A few hundred years,” said Yasha, completely deadpan.

Beau let Yasha spin her out and twirl her, and then they came back together. She examined Yasha’s face.

“Is that a joke?” she asked.

“Yes,” Yasha said. “But this is nice.”

“Yeah,” Beau agreed, and then she just let herself dance.

As the mostly-drunk group made their way back to the van, Jester and Caduceus leading the way, Beau stumbled along with Yasha supporting her on one side. Molly had claimed he didn’t need any help, but almost as soon as they’d left the club he’d faceplanted on the sidewalk, and he was now nursing his skinned palms.

“Astrid,” Caleb was saying to Jester, who was helping him step inside the back of the van. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Caleb,” Jester said with a sigh, her expression serious for once. She helped him to the side of the van and pulled off his jacket, placing it over him like a blanket. Nott perched next to him, seeming somewhat more lucid than most of them.

Beau and the rest of the group made their way inside the van as Caduceus took the driver’s seat and began taking them to wherever their next safe house was. Beau honestly didn’t give a shit where they went so long as there was a bed—or a couch—or even a soft floor, honestly. Her head was already beginning to pound and it wasn’t even the next morning yet.

Caleb was still mumbling to himself and Nott. Something in German, then something about a fire. Nott looked tense, and Beau felt strangely as if she were eavesdropping even though she didn’t understand.

Most of them were lulled into slumber soon after by the hum of the van, but Beau’s eyes stayed open, examining this strange group with which she had now found herself. Molly was curled against Yasha’s shoulder, and Caleb’s mutterings had finally given way to sleep with Nott at his side. Jester and Fjord were sleeping on each other’s shoulders.

Beau had been considering running away at the first given opportunity, and this was clearly it. However, she didn’t feel any urge to bolt, which for her was an unusual feeling. She’d been running away from other people, from her family, from responsibility, her whole life. But this both felt like something that she couldn’t escape and maybe a little bit like something she didn’t want to.

As he pulled in and turned off the van, Caduceus turned around to look at her. It was dark, but she felt somehow sure he could tell she was awake.

“Are you staying?” he asked, very quietly.

She looked around her. “Yeah,” she said, her usual bitterness dulled to honesty with a little liquid help. “I’m staying.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of light-hearted entertainment for the M9! But will it last...
> 
> (Thanks to my beta comfortcharacters!)


	7. Interlude - Jester

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> added a few tags, so keep an eye on those!

In spite of the tragedies and terrors she’d lived through, Jester couldn’t help but feel like life was overall pretty great. Sure, she got sad sometimes, but for all her life she’d had someone at her side supporting her and loving her, even if they couldn’t be around all the time. She’d been isolated for parts of her life, but she’d never once felt truly alone.

The first person to care for her, of course, was her mama. Marion loved her daughter more than life itself, and Jester always felt it. Her mama wasn’t very good about going outside or meeting people—especially once the whispers of war started. But she always made time to play with Jester when she was small and cooed over her doodles—even when she did them all over the walls of the apartments they shared together.

To Jester, the year 1919 didn’t seem that long ago, but it had been a shock when the Mighty Nein had given her a cupcake for her one hundredth birthday—still the baby of the group, of course. A part of her had almost wanted to visit her home city, but another part of her still felt that it was too painful.

She’d grown up in Gdańsk, perched right on the Baltic Sea in northern Poland. At the time, it was the Free City of Danzig, filled with tension in the inter-war period. As a child, Jester had understood little of the politics. From the window of her room, Jester could see the waves, and when she wasn’t drawing or talking to her imaginary friends, she would just watch the ocean. She’d even drawn all over the windows at one point, making it look like a sea creature was emerging to take a big bite out of the beach. Her mama had giggled at that one, and Jester had beamed. She lived to make her mama laugh.

Her mama liked her work as a cabaret dancer, and Jester loved to paw through the expensive-looking fabrics and jewelry in her costume drawer. When Jester was a little bit older, she understood that that wasn’t all her mama did, and understood why it was important that she keep quiet and hidden when her mama had guests over. Jester never once begrudged her mama this hidden life. Marion was Jester’s favorite person in the entire world.

Her mama brought in tutors, quietly, secretly, to teach Jester many things. She liked learning languages okay, and hated mathematics, but she loved her arts and sciences classes so much that her mama doubled the tutor’s rates so she could spend more hours poring over books and filling canvases. She was having so much fun she barely noticed the way the city’s atmosphere seemed to darken as time passed. She often saw smoke or angry crowds outside her window, but it never seemed to touch her in her mama’s apartments. Her tutors started to look more stressed, and she even saw a few creases work their way into her mama’s brow. Her mama made sure that she spoke German just as well as Polish, and started using more of it herself. But no one talked about it to Jester, and somehow she felt as if asking would break some kind of spell that was keeping everything the same.

Still, as Jester slowly came into adulthood she would leave the apartments sometimes, always careful not to be seen or recognized. People spoke in hushed tones and hurried to their destinations, but Jester loved visiting all of the city’s bakeries, getting herself some cake or pączki to bring back to her mama. She never spent much time away from her mama, but she made a few casual friends, and began to pick up on the news of the city and beyond. It was clear to her then that the world was buzzing with fear.

Still, when she looked around and still saw echoes of her idyllic childhood home, it was hard to believe the darkness of the world could reach her and her mama.

Of course, this wasn’t true. Jester wished she’d known who the German man she’d locked out onto her mama’s balcony had been. It had just been an amusing prank born of boredom and isolation, not anything meant to cause real harm. If she’d realized how important he was in the city government—and how dangerous that made him—she might have refrained. Or maybe not. Jester had never really been very good at curbing her own impulses.

So then it was the dead of night, and Jester, who had never left Gdańsk in her life, was throwing things into a bag as her mama buttoned her coat. Her mama was crying, but there was nothing to be done now except to get Jester out before they came for her. She knew she’d likely be killed for the mild humiliation she’d inflicted. There was no question of if her mama would go with her. Jester knew she couldn’t.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” Jester said, holding her mama’s face with one hand. “I love you so much. I’ll come back, okay? Once things are safe.”

Marion gave Jester a tight hug that squeezed all the air out of her, but Jester never wanted to let go. “Be safe, my little sapphire. I love you.”

When Jester left the city in the dead of night, she still didn’t feel alone. She could still feel her mama’s arms around her.

Without anywhere to go, Jester followed her studies. She had always loved poring over the medical books her tutors had brought in, so she began to study to be a nurse. Her mama sent her money, but she treasured the words in her letters more than the gifts that always accompanied them. Even more than a hundred years later, Jester would open a little box among her belongings sometimes, inlaid with rubies and sapphires. She would read over the aged papers, carefully preserved, and she could still feel that final hug in every letter.

She was at a training camp in the fall of 1939, barely having turned twenty. There were other girls, all wanting to feel useful as the tensions of the world seemed to heighten to the breaking point again and again and again. They were terrifying times, but Jester was grateful to be around girls her own age and see more of the world. It was a turbulent entrance into adult life, but even though it felt wrong to enjoy it she didn’t know any other way.

When the fighting actually started, the collective tension reached its peak. Somehow, in all of her medical training—even constantly hearing stories from the women around her who’d taken part in the Great War—she’d never even begun to understand what a real battle would be like. It felt like the Nazis and the Soviets were striking from every side, and she could barely sleep before being woken up by more gunfire and having to flee or be caught in the crossfire.

Her mama’s letters brought her some respite, relieved that she was alive and well—if afraid for Jester’s safety. As she treated fallen soldiers and fallen friends, Jester wanted to feel like her medical training was coming to good use. But she just felt angry. Angry that people could come into her home and destroy the things that she loved, without consequence. A helping hand to those who were on the ground was invaluable, and she understood that. But she wanted to do more.

She was trying to help an unconscious man on the ground, not sure if he was covered in his own blood or someone else’s, when the bullet caught her in the chest. She looked down, patting the bloody spot on her white nurse’s apron. The pain barely even caught up to her before she went down, collapsing next to the man she’d been trying to help. No one even saw her fall in all the chaos.

Jester would be grateful for that later when she awoke. She looked down at the placement of the hole in her apron, and she knew she should be dead. But she wasn’t.

She’d heard from some of the others that they’d doubted what had happened at first. They’d thought it a fluke or a hallucination until it had been proven again and again. Jester hadn’t been like that. When she’d woken up again, she knew exactly what had happened and what she needed to do.

After that battle, she went to Warsaw. She walked there, passing the many fallen bodies of her friends, of strangers, of enemies. Of course she’d heard that war was hell, but it was another thing to live it. The blood on her apron had long dried by the time she arrived, but Jester was just getting started.

As if the world knew what Jester was feeling, it wasn’t long before she came into contact with the Home Army. She had some military training, but it was her brash confidence that recommended her more than anything else. Jester would walk up to anyone in the world and introduce herself, and if she wanted it that way, they’d never be able to tell how she really felt about them. She worked in so many units, gaining a reputation for seeking out the most dangerous assignments. No matter what, she thought, they couldn’t hold her forever.

She fought the Nazis in her home country and abroad, directly and through espionage. They might have doubted her at first, but after a time her superiors recognized the cheerful woman as a legitimate threat. Jester still felt that anger against what had been done to her home raging within her, mixing with the idyllic echoes of a childhood she longed to return to. She had been given a gift, and she was going to use it.

It was while she was abroad that she met Fjord for the first time. She’d dreamed of the others, unsure of what these strange images meant, but when she met him it was like greeting an old friend. He was handsome, confident, suave. She would later realize that half of this was an act, of course, but when she first met him he felt like a prince out of a storybook.

She was on the coast, then, not far from her home—though she still didn’t dare return. He came on a ship from across the sea, and she knew him instantly. He hadn’t bothered with pretense, coming right up to her.

“Fjord,” he’d offered, bowing slightly. His voice was more mild than she had expected, with a polite British accent. Often, he would slip into his other, more confident-sounding voice, but from that moment onwards she knew the softer one was the real Fjord. Fjord had always been like slowly putting a puzzle together to her, but that just made her love him even more. After all,

“Jester Lavorre,” she gave in turn, curtsying slightly with a giggle.

“Can we talk?” he’d asked. She’d known if she said yes, her life would change. But her life had already changed so many times in her young life, so what else was she to say?

“Of course,” she responded, grateful for her mama’s English lessons.

They talked about many things that day. As he explained, she saw the decades expanding before her. Her life was to be nearly endless, and although that was wonderful, it was also terrifying.

One thought tugged on her mind more than any other. “Fjord,” she said quietly. “What about my mama?” She knew she sounded a little bit like a child, but she felt like one in that moment. She had never been in a world without her mama, and she didn’t know if she could live without the one person who had always been a constant in her life. She didn’t know what it would be like to be so utterly alone.

Fjord’s tense, sad expression told her all she needed to know. She hadn’t even needed his response, really.

They talked a little more, and then left each other for the night. Jester promised to meet up with him again the next day, and then returned to her home. She knew what she needed to do.

The war was ending—slowly, painfully, and hanging on to every last piece of happiness it could get its grip on—but it was ending. She had to take the chance while she had it.

She was grateful to be alone, that night, for Jester had never liked it when other people saw her cry. She had always been a beacon of happiness to her mama, and it was ingrained in her now to be happy for other people. But as she worked, feeling like she was ripping out her own heart and soul, she could not keep a smile on her face.

_My dear Mrs. Marion Lavorre,_

_It is with deep regret that I write to inform you of the death of your daughter, Miss Jester Lavorre, on the first of July 1945…_

She had to keep finding new paper as the tears stained her sheets, ruining her careful forgery work. As she sealed the final letter, she took a moment and just allowed herself to break down, curling in on herself and shaking. In a way, she’d known this had to come the second she’d walked away from that fatal gunshot, but it still hurt more keenly than anything she’d ever experienced.

There was a part of her that told her to forget the letter, forget Fjord, go home and stay with her mama for the rest of her life. But she knew what would happen if she did that. As her mama aged and withered away, tied to her daughter who was forever young, her mama would never get the chance to live and be free. She knew her mama had always welcomed the burden of her existence, but this was beyond that. It would be letting her mama die while she gleamed of immortality and youth forever. 

Jester couldn’t leave her mama to watch her daughter stay young while she aged and died. The only way to give her mama her life back and any chance at happiness was for Jester to be gone.

Jester’s mama meant more to her than life itself, and she knew the reverse was also true, but she had no choice but to accept that their time together was over. That hug that night had truly been their last.

She gave the letter to a courier the next morning, then went to go see Fjord. The two of them had plans to make.

After the war, Jester left Europe for the first time in her life, with Fjord at her side. They sailed the seas together, and he showed her his great love: the ocean. She still remembered a night when they’d encountered a group of jellyfish in the water, as the waves were so still they’d even reflected the stars.

Together, they went to America. Fjord had spent much of his life there, but Jester had another reason. From what little bits and pieces she’d heard from her mama, that was where her father was. She knew little about the man, except that whatever physical features of hers that weren’t her mama’s were probably his, and a few hints to his name and profession. Still, that didn’t give her much to go on. But she had time.

It seemed like fate when she finally found him in the first American city she’d seen—New York. She and Fjord had done a little bit of work for the Italian mafia after the war, a fairly harmless odd job here or there to make money, but she’d never even thought about how familiar the Gentleman looked to her. She’d realized it with a start, how much sense it all made. Of course he was her father. She could see all at once why he never would have returned to her mama, and why he had looked so sad when she had once offhandedly mentioned Marion’s name.

But Jester didn’t tell him who she was. She had already lost her mama, and she didn’t want to gain a father only to lose him too. She had searched for him for another reason. Jester knew how much her mama must be suffering without her, since she was suffering the same way. Her mama didn’t have Fjord, or anyone else, by her side. So Jester had resolved to give her mama back the one man she had ever loved.

In the end, it was surprisingly easy. A forged letter here, a telegram there. When she had seen the pain in the Gentleman’s eyes, she knew he still loved Marion. All it took was a push.

When she received the news that he’d left the country abruptly to cross the sea, she simply gave a self-satisfied smile and told Fjord that her work was done. Her parents would have each other again, and she would leave them to live out the rest of their lives. She prayed every day that her mama would heal from the wounds Jester had inflicted on her, in the hope of sparing her even worse pain.

Marion was the first person to care for her, and Fjord the second. As they grew closer and closer, and she learned more about his true self underneath his strange mask, she found she liked it even better than the fairy tale hero persona he’d given her at first. The real Fjord wasn’t as confident or as tough, but that was okay. She loved what he perceived as his weaknesses just as much as his strengths. It would take them many more years to finally stop circling each other like lovesick schoolchildren, decades ended with a kiss, but she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

They dreamed of the others, of course. Not often, but enough to know that they weren’t alone. When Caduceus showed up in their lives one day, bringing with him the rest of the Mighty Nein, they fell into place like they’d always belonged there.

When Jester received news of her mama’s death, the Mighty Nein had been there to care for her. For the first time in her life she didn’t hide her tears, as they all sat with her. She knew they understood her pain more than anyone else in the world ever had. She had lost so much, but gained so much as well.

There were some days when she could barely remember her mama’s face. After she’d confessed this to him in the dead of night, Fjord had left on a journey for some time. It wasn’t unusual for them to leave the group for a solo mission from time to time, but she missed him.

He returned before long with a smile and a gift. Somehow, back in whatever remained of her home, he’d found a childhood sketchbook of hers with a watercolor portrait. Her mama had laughed when Jester had asked her to sit for it. There were a child’s imperfections, but when she looked at it she could remember with perfect clarity the expression on her mama’s face when she had painted her.

Jester kept that picture in the box now too, with her mama’s letters. She didn’t need anyone to feel sorry for her, and she didn’t regret the choices she’d made in her life. She missed her mama every day, even as the decades continued to pass her by.

But no matter what, she would use the chance she’d been given to make the world better. No matter how much pain she’d seen and endured, Jester still felt like there was more good in the world than bad. She would try to make sure that stayed true with every day of her life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my girl :')
> 
> Again, I'm not an expert although I've done research, so let me know if you notice anything weird!
> 
> Thank you to comfortcharacters for beta-ing!


	8. Chapter 8

Beau awoke sluggishly the next morning, head pounding and mouth dry with the residual taste of vodka. She let out a small groan and rolled onto her back and forced herself to sit up. She barely recognized the room she was in, having collapsed into bed without even turning the lights on once they finally arrived. Sunlight streamed in through the windows, and she felt a stab of resentment that it was such a nice day when she felt like such shit.

As she grabbed her phone, checking the time, she felt her stomach swoop as she saw a text. Beau didn’t get many texts, partially because she didn’t have many friends and partially because she ignored her phone like her life depended on it.

This number she didn’t even have saved, but she knew who it was. Beau hadn’t gotten a text from her the entire time she’d been at school. She’d assumed her father had ordered radio silence—at least until the letter. But she’d know that number anywhere. It was her mother.

Stomach churning both emotionally and physically, she clicked on the notification.

_Where are you?_

Beau shut her phone completely off and tossed it down on the bedside table with a clatter. She walked over to the door frame, noticing she was still wearing the red dress from the night before and frowning in discomfort.

She reached out for the doorknob, but before she could turn it she heard a loud knock and a voice from the other side.

“Beau! Beau wake up! Beau!”

There was only one person both adorable and annoying enough to check up on her first thing in the morning. She might have appreciated the thought, but as it was the voice was unconscionably loud. She pulled the door open.

“What is it, Jester?” she said with a huff. Jester looked bright-eyed and cheerful, and Beau felt like if she looked at her sunny smile for too long her headache was going to get worse. She clutched the side of her head with a wince.

“Sorry,” Jester said in a whisper that still managed to be too loud. “I brought you some clothes.”

Beau looked down at the pile in Jester’s arms with suspicion. From what she’d seen, Jester wore mostly dresses with frills, and Beau would rather go back to military school than wear one.

“Don’t worry, they’re not mine,” Jester said, grinning. “Mostly Fjord’s, although Caleb and Nott threw in a few things. We’ll go shopping soon, okay?” She looked terrifically excited by the prospect.

Beau took the pile and managed a small smile. “Thanks,” she grunted, and shut the door to go change.

She almost tossed Jester’s dress into a corner, but as she started to ball it up, she thought better of it. She laid it over the half-made bed in an attempt at neatness, resolving to take Jester up on that shopping trip if only so she could stop borrowing people’s clothes.

After changing into a loose-fitting t-shirt and cargo shorts that needed to be heavily belted, she made her way towards the group’s voices. She entered a small living room.

Molly looked just about as bad as she felt, although he was probably dressed better. Even though he was in the middle of what looked like a jelly donut, he was wearing lacy black gloves that she was convinced were going to end up covered in glazed sugar. He was sipping a coffee and stayed uncharacteristically silent as she fetched her own. She wondered if his headache was as severe as her own.

Caleb and Fjord looked slightly better off than the two of them, although not by much. Caleb had three mugs of coffee in front of him, and from the look of him, they were all his. Caduceus and Jester were of course completely fine, and Caduceus was fetching more food from the kitchen for the team. Yasha sat by herself by the window, looking outside and slowly sipping from a mug.

Nott, although she’d had more to drink than either Beau or Molly, was in the middle of a spirited discussion with Jester which Beau had no idea how she was tolerating.

She begrudgingly took the only seat left, right next to Molly, after fetching her own mug of coffee. She raised her cup towards him in a gesture of solidarity in their misery, and he gave her a look but did the same.

“You look like hell,” she grunted.

“You’re no spring peach yourself, darling,” he responded. “This is the worst hangover I’ve had since… oh… never mind, I can’t count back that far when I’m hung over.”

“So, how old are you?” Beau said. “None of you assholes will give me a straight answer.”

“I’ve no straight answer to give, I’m afraid,” Molly said with a shrug, and then hissed in pain as he moved his head too quickly.

Beau groaned and leaned back in her chair, nursing her mug and resolving not to speak to anyone until there was no more coffee left in it.

Molly considered her as she drank silently, watching the conversations happening around them.

“I really don’t know,” he said. “I mean that. Not even fucking with you for once.”

“Hm,” she said. She looked at him to confirm his sincerity, but she didn’t find a trace of a joke in his face. “Really?”

“Really,” Molly said. “I mean, it was a long time ago. But I don’t remember a lot of things, so… I couldn’t tell you when I was born, or where, even.”

“Nothing at all?” Beau said, reluctantly curious.

Molly shrugged and took another long drag of his coffee. “Yeah. I met our lovely Yasha not long after I woke up with no memories, and Gustav took us in.”

Perhaps hearing her name, Yasha looked up and walked over to them. Caleb and Fjord had been roped into whatever debate was happening between Jester and Nott, and Caduceus was still in the kitchen, giving them a strange moment of privacy amongst the din.

“Hey, Yasha,” Beau said, aiming for casual and then spilling coffee down her chin as she briefly forgot how to hold a mug.

“Hey,” Yasha said, perching on the edge of the table in a way that shouldn’t have looked as cool as it did. Beau felt a pinprick of sweat at the back of her neck as she remembered the feeling of Yasha’s arm wrapped around her as they’d danced. She wondered if there was the tiniest possibility that Yasha was thinking about it too.

“I was just telling our new friend my _tragic_ backstory,” Molly said.

Yasha let out a rare smile. “Oh, yes. Your life has been very difficult.”

“You’ll never find someone with more sadness in their past than I,” Molly declared, leaning back in the chair with a dramatic movement that almost knocked his cup of coffee over. “Shit!”

“Uh huh,” Beau said, eyebrow raised.

“I was just telling her about Gustav,” Molly said.

“Oh, yes.” Yasha didn’t elaborate, and Molly smirked.

“Yasha’s not really one for storytelling, so I’ll take this one. Gustav was an immortal we knew—older than both of us, by far. He found us after we met each other.”

Beau looked around at the rest of the Mighty Nein. “…Was?” she asked.

Molly let out a laugh without any humor in it. “Yes. I guess no one’s told you that special little nugget of information yet. Our immortality isn’t forever, you know.”

Beau leaned back. “…Are you fucking with me?”

Yasha shook her head. “No. It’s long. But no one knows how long. One day it just… stops. You stop healing. And eventually, you die.” It was probably the most words Beau had ever heard her string together, but she wished Yasha didn’t sound so morose.

Molly gestured to all of them. “We just go along and hope it keeps lasting, and enjoy what we have while it’s here. No real way to know when the end is coming until it does—just like regular humans, I guess. It does last a good long time, though, so no need for you to worry about it.”

Beau nodded. “So… is he the only one who you’ve known who died?”

Molly and Yasha nodded.

“He died only a few years after we met him, so—we’ve had some time to cope, don’t worry.” Molly mimed wiping tears away from his eyes, but Beau had the sense somewhat that his emotion wasn’t entirely fake.

Before she had a chance to respond, Nott slammed her hands down next to them, nearly knocking over half of the food on the table. “ _Say that again, Fjord! I dare you!”_ she shrieked. Jester was almost laughing herself out of her chair as Fjord protested whatever they’d been arguing about.

As Nott pulled herself onto the table to enact whatever vengeance Fjord had earned, Beau turned back to Molly and Yasha, but Molly had stood up.

He drained the rest of his coffee cup and walked into the kitchen, tugging on his lace gloves slightly. Yasha watched him, too.

Their meet-up location with Essek apparently wasn’t far away, so the group entertained themselves until it got dark. Jester was working on a mural on the outside of the house that she’d apparently started the last time they’d stayed there. She promised Beau there would be lots of hidden dicks in the small details. Caleb had holed himself up in his room to read, which seemed like his go-to. Apparently Nott liked to hang out in a small lab they’d put together in one of the guest rooms, and Fjord was poring over maps in the study.

Caduceus was somehow already working on dinner. After making herself a half-assed Bloody Mary, Beau studiously avoided the kitchen, since she’d already drunk her weight in tea for the day. Yasha was… somewhere, since Beau was never really sure where she disappeared to, and was too intimidated to ask.

So when she went outside, Bloody Mary in hand, she supposed she should have predicted that the only person out there would be Molly, who was lying in the sun by the small pool.

He looked up at her as she passed, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. As she made her way past him, he sat up slightly.

“Wait,” he said. “Stay for a second.”

“What?” she said, taking a big gulp of her drink.

“Do you want a tarot reading?” he asked lazily. “It’s one of my many talents.”

Beau nobly resisted the urge to upend her Bloody Mary over his head. The drink didn’t deserve it. “Fuck you,” she responded.

“What?” he said, pulling his sunglasses down slightly to give her a look. “It’s a simple offer.”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

She glared at him.

He sighed. “How about regular cards? Loser has to tell an embarrassing secret.”

“No fucking way.”

“Then… we play for your greatest lie.” As if he saw her hesitating slightly, Molly whipped out a pack of cards from god knows where and held them out to her.

She sat down next to him, still glaring. “I’m only doing this because I’m fucking bored.”

Molly laughed. “Why do you think _I’m_ hanging out with _you?”_

Beau had a lot of experience playing cards, but even she had to admit Molly was good. Then again, she considered, he probably had a lot of practice.

Finally, she laid down her last hand and he did the same. Just as she was about to admit defeat, she saw something near his sleeve. It was a tiny gesture, but she knew that motion. She’d done the same a million times.

“You motherfucker! You cheated!” she said, pulling his hand to retrieve the card she’d seen in his sleeve. He hissed in pain, but she seized the card and held it in front of his face.

“We weren’t even playing for real stakes,” he protested with a smile.

“You’re a real bastard,” she said.

He shrugged. “No arguments here.”

Beau started to get up to leave, but he stopped her.

“Wait. We haven’t done the reward yet,” he said.

“Yeah, I’m not gonna count that as your victory when I _caught you cheating,_ ” she said with a raised eyebrow.

“No, it’s yours,” he admitted. “Cheating only works when you don’t get caught.”

“Okay, so what’s your biggest lie, then,” she said with a huff. “I need another drink so make it fast.”

“Hmm…” Molly mused, dragging it out just to irritate her. “Well, I once convinced all of Paris I was reincarnated royalty.”

“Royalty,” she said flatly.

“Yes,” he said. “I told them I was the spirit of Francis the First, come back to enjoy the modern culture of the city—well, modern for the time.”

“And they believed you?” Beau said, disbelief dripping from her words.

“Well, I did know the man,” Molly said. “At least briefly. Plus, don’t tell them I said this, but I think people have gotten smarter with time, if I’m being completely honest. That was still in one of the… er… dim eras.”

“So what happened?” Beau asked.

“Oh, curious, are we?” Molly said. “Well, unfortunately I timed my royal revival to approximately the time of the revolution, so I had to get out of town quick if I wanted to keep my head. But, it was fun while it lasted.”

Beau sat back, a reluctant smile playing on her lips. “You’re an asshole, but that’s kind of a good story,” she said.

Molly hopped to his feet just so he could give a dramatic bow. “Oh thank you, Madame Beauregard,” he said.

“Forget I said anything, you’re big-headed enough already,” she said, but she knew she was smiling. “I’m gonna go be anywhere else.”

“Fare thee well,” Molly said, blowing her a kiss. In a motion that was becoming familiar, she flipped him off.

Beau didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep at the dining room table, but when she woke up someone had draped a light quilt around her shoulders. Probably Caduceus, considering the mug of cold tea sitting next to her. She yawned and stretched, seeing the last light of dusk fading from the sky outside.

Cracking her neck from side to side, she walked over to the window. She hadn’t really bothered to look out at the street, but it looked like they were in a small cul-de-sac with some pockets of woods nearby. A totally average location among identical houses, which is probably why they had chosen it.

She almost didn’t notice anything. Beau had never considered herself the most observant of people, especially when she was tired and still a tiny bit hungover. In the shrubs by their home, maybe twenty feet away by the road, something metal glinted.

Before she had a chance to move, something came crashing in through the window. She staggered backwards, shock freezing her limbs momentarily.

“Guys!” Beau shouted, just as the explosion went off.

A few seconds later, she crawled to her feet. Her ears were ringing, and when she touched them she saw blood. Her hearing was mostly gone, but she staggered to her feet, trusting that the shrapnel wounds and damage to her ears would heal in a few moments. Right now, she had to find the others.

She wanted to shout for them, but she knew she’d barely be able to hear her own voice, much less their responses. Plus, she had no idea where their attackers were.

As she stumbled towards the next room, she lurched back and flattened herself against the wall before they could see her. A group of people dressed in black were standing over Jester, Fjord, and Yasha’s inert bodies. A shiver ran down her spine seeing them all lying still on the ground, flat on their backs and tied to each other. They had to be tranquilized, because there was no way these scrawny-looking attackers could take on Yasha by themselves, Beau thought bitterly. The coward’s way out of a fight.

She felt a pop in her eardrum accompanied by slight pain, and, with a cautious tap, found that the hearing in one of her ears had returned. She pressed herself as close to the doorframe as possible, facing her good ear towards the room.

“Where are the others?” growled one of the men.

“They’re not far,” a woman responded. Beau held her breath as she heard motion. She might have been angry, but she wasn’t stupid. She couldn’t take them on her own—especially if they’d subdued Yasha. She had to find the others, and their weapons.

Beau turned around, but with a start she realized she wasn’t alone in the room. Her still-damaged ear hadn’t warned her of his approach, subtle in spite of his size. He towered over her, and probably would for even Yasha or Caduceus. He stood directly over her, eyes cold.

The man was completely bald, with a large scar on one side of his face partially coated with tattoos. He wasn’t just tall, he was broad and heavily muscled, and she noted his giant clenched fists with a note of apprehension. When he smiled, Beau could see a number of gold teeth in his mouth.

She tried to duck and roll towards the room’s other exit, but she was still sluggish from her wounds. With one hand, he lifted her up by the neck into the air with a sudden, swift motion. She kicked out at him but he barely seemed to feel it. She felt her windpipe being crushed by his hand.

“Lorenzo! Where are you!” screeched the man from the other room.

“Right here,” he said, voice deep and gravelly. He was still smiling as he crushed the life from her. Her vision was swimming with black spots. She tried to pull at his hand, but it felt like immovable steel.

Before she could pass out completely, he tossed her into the room with the others. She wheezed for air, curled in on herself and coughing. Beau saw Yasha’s glazed-over eyes blink as she lay on her back, and felt another stab of rage as they tied her hands behind her back.

As Lorenzo left the room again, she collapsed onto her back, giving herself a moment to recover before she gave these guys hell. As she lay there, trying to suck air back into her lungs, she saw a face peer around the corner from the adjoining room.

She kept her face calm, to give no indication to their attackers that there was anything to see, but she made steady eye contact with the newcomer to the scene. She saw him survey the scene slowly, rage in his eyes.

Molly pressed his finger to his lips, and disappeared around the corner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> : O
> 
> thank you guys so much for commenting! Reading what you write means so much to me. And thanks to comfortcharacters for beta-ing!!!


	9. Interlude - Mollymauk

Mollymauk Tealeaf, Molly to his friends, told lots of stories about where he’d been born and when. He told Jester he’d sprung from the sea like Botticelli’s Venus, and once he’d confided in Fjord that he’d been a cult’s human sacrifice until he’d risen again. He’d even told Nott that he wasn’t actually immortal, he just had a truly incredible skincare routine.

He didn’t think these were strictly lies, exactly—well, except for the last one—because they could have been true. He thought he deserved an exciting origin story, because he didn’t really have one.

All he really knew for sure was that one day, Molly had woken up in a grave. He was alone, dressed in dark clothes he didn’t recognize and that were thoroughly stained with blood. He would discover the red eye tattoos later, not that he knew what they meant. He didn’t remember anything—his childhood, how he’d ended up there, even his name.

When he’d dragged himself out of the grave, feeling numb and utterly empty, he hadn’t known where to go. He’d walked until he’d hit a city that he would only later find out was Dublin. People had regarded him with suspicion when he’d walked past them, and in retrospect he could hardly blame them. He was a stranger covered in blood, looking grim and haggard, and unable to speak beyond saying what he felt.

“Empty.” For weeks, that was all he was able to say. “Empty.”

He slept outside on the streets, unable to remember enough to function. He wondered now if he’d even eaten or drunk anything, or if he’d simply died and revived on the streets without noticing. Those weeks were a dark blur in Molly’s life, one that he preferred not to think on. It was the bridge between whoever had owned this body before him, and he had no reason to believe that they’d been a pleasant individual.

As he’d lived in this half-stupor, there was one thing he remembered distinctly. When he’d slept, he’d dreamed of a woman. Flashes of two different colored eyes and thick pale blonde hair, and a tattoo on her bottom lip. He, of course, had no idea what this meant. He was certain he’d never met her before.

Luckily, she dreamt of him too.

One day, he’d blinked himself awake and she was standing there before him in the flesh. He’d thought he was still dreaming.

She didn’t dress like the other people around them, as if she was a warrior woman come from a different time and place. She regarded him with a cool stare, then hauled him to his feet and practically carried him to an inn.

She’d dumped him in a bed and fed him some kind of broth. He’d barely been able to eat, but she’d stayed with him until he was feeling less hazy than he had in weeks.

“I’m Yasha,” she said, voice accented slightly with something he didn’t recognize.

“Empty,” he’d responded.

“MT.” She gave him what was probably supposed to be a comforting pat on the shoulder, but that shook his entire frame. “It is good to know you.”

From then on, Yasha had always been in his life. She never said much to other people, but Molly felt confident that he knew her better than anyone in the world. She had always carried a deep sadness in her, just as he carried an emptiness. But together, they each felt more comfortable.

One night towards the beginning, when she’d been sleeping next to him as he recovered, she twitched in her sleep. Her words were incredibly quiet, but he could make out one. A name. “Zuala,” she whispered.

He had been about to shake her awake, but her eyes blinked open without him. He could hardly believe it of this stoic woman, but there was a tear at the corner of her eye. Molly thought she might wipe it away, but she just let it fall.

“I am okay,” she said to him. “Go back to sleep.”

He considered her, and then spoke his first words to the world. “Are you sure?”

She had just blinked at him and smiled, just a tiny one. “Yes. Thank you, MT.”

Molly had tried to figure out what kind of work a six-foot warrior and tattooed amnesiac could make in Dublin in the year 1500, but they’d been relatively unlucky. They didn’t go anywhere without each other, in spite of the fact that they were even more terrifying to the city’s people together than apart.

Yasha had told him about the hundreds of years she’d been alive, wandering the world. She said she had always assumed there were others, but he was the first one she’d been able to locate. He told her, in stuttering sentences, about the now-empty grave.

She said there were portions of her life she didn’t remember, either. She wondered if the trauma of dying was enough to wipe some things away.

Yasha asked him if he wanted them to search, to try and find out where he’d come from. He looked down at the sinister red eyes on his skin. He said no.

And so, “MT” became Mollymauk Tealeaf. She’d almost laughed, a rare sight for her, when he’d told her the name. That had made him decide to keep it more than anything. If he was going to stand out no matter what he did, he was going to do it with purpose.

He liked Dublin, and wondered if that fondness was nostalgia of whoever’s body it had been. But when he ran into a woman in a bar who smiled at him and called him “Lucien,” the cold sweat that broke out all over his body told him they needed to leave.

Yasha, bless her, didn’t question it. She was packed and ready to go, and so they went. They didn’t talk about where they were going, and just headed out into the world.

Molly and Yasha spent years traveling through Europe, but in the end they spent most of their time between Italy and France. Molly always asked Yasha where she wanted to go, but she always shrugged. Only once, when they’d almost taken a job in Norway, she’d shaken her head. He’d turned the man down flat and without explanation.

Staying on the move felt smart. The longer they stayed in one place, the more likely it felt that someone would notice these two unusual figures who never aged or got hurt for more than a few minutes.

Molly spent a lot of time jumping between theatre troops, while Yasha did odd security jobs. He loved performing in front of a crowd, and the more spectacular the costumes, the better. Molly wanted to get as far away from the black, bloodstained clothes as he could. With the money they made, he bought gilded trinkets and expensive fabrics.

He let his hair grow long and then cut it all off—just to prove that he could do whatever he wanted to with his body. The tattoos still bothered him, but he just covered them with garish colors and too much jewelry.

Yasha still dressed almost the same way as she had when he’d met her. She had no interest in updating her wardrobe, but occasionally he’d bring her a silver earring or some small thing that she liked. It took him a long time to realize that her favorite things to collect were flowers, which she pressed and preserved in a thick book. She kept it close to her always, and one of the rare times she’d gotten truly angry with him was when she’d caught him thumbing through it without permission.

So the two of them explored Europe together during the Renaissance, Molly indulging every whim he could think of and Yasha standing ever-present at his side. Molly loved almost every moment of it.

The two of them died every once in a while—Molly to a burglar breaking into their home, Yasha to a bad carriage accident—but they always came back.

Molly took many lovers over the years, always leaving before he could get too attached. It would be no good for either of them, since he’d have to leave them behind eventually regardless. It didn’t make him too sad, since the time he spent with each was valuable to him. Yasha, as far as he could tell, took none. He understood why, of course, but it still brought a frown to his face. She deserved not to spend eternity alone.

The two of them met Gustav slightly before the whole French Revolution fiasco. He found the two of them in their palatial country home—Molly’s idea, with the money they’d gathered over a few hundred years—and he felt familiar to the two of them instantly, putting a face to the flashes in their dreams. They dreamt of other people from time to time, but it felt blurry and far-off. Besides, the two of them had never really needed anyone permanent aside from each other.

He’d been a kind friend, although he didn’t stay with them too often. After they’d fled Paris due to Molly’s ill-timed con, they’d taken refuge with his circus. The idea was still a fairly new one, but it fit Molly’s liking exactly. The bright colors and weird people filled a hole inside of him, and although he knew they couldn’t stay with the Fletching and Moondrop Carnival forever, he heartily enjoyed the time they had together.

One of the women he’d met there, a tattooed lady with spiraling designs down her chest and back, had introduced him to her artist. It was incredibly painful, Yasha tolerating his fist clenched painfully around hers. But when he looked at his body for the first time afterwards, red eyes no longer a glaring reminder of a past he couldn’t remember and instead part of a beautiful mural, he finally felt exactly like himself.

He got more and more tattoos, peacock feathers edging up his neck and geometric designs across his back, and felt like with every line of ink he left Lucien a little further behind.

Of course, as they’d known, it couldn’t last. Gustav had seemed more frail in recent months, and he could tell Yasha was worried too, as well as she concealed it. When he started coughing one day and didn’t stop until there was blood on his handkerchief, they’d known something really was wrong.

“I’m ill,” he confessed. “Very ill.”

“But… how?” Molly had asked. “You’re like us.”

Gustav gave them a tired smile, face pale. “Nothing lasts forever,” he said with a shrug.

After Gustav’s funeral, the two of them left the carnival. There was an emptiness that was familiar to Molly, and he knew Yasha felt it too. They felt lost and purposeless.

Molly looked back at his hundreds of years of life, and felt like he’d achieved nothing. So he resolved to try to do at least a little good in the world—good for someone other than himself and Yasha. They were more careful about the odd jobs they took, after that. Nothing that would put innocent people in a bad place, and more things that would put bad people in where they belonged. They traveled even further than they ever had, spending some time seeking out the farthest reaches of the world. With every town they left better than they’d found it, Molly felt the hole in his heart fill up a little more.

Caduceus, when he finally found them, slotted right into place like he’d always been there. He was a calming influence on Molly, and a comforting presence to Yasha. When he told them that he was searching for the others, they didn’t take much convincing to accompany him. Perhaps it was time they expanded their horizons slightly.

Molly never abandoned his flashy colors and hedonistic tendencies. They were the few things that made him feel like truly himself. But he tried to frame those things in activities that would make the world better, instead of worse. He knew the Mighty Nein were good for him—they made him less selfish.

The number of people he cared about expanded, and he wondered for just a second if he’d ever had friends before the grave. But he dismissed that thought. He knew with complete certainty that this group of people would never abandon him like whoever had left him there had. He didn’t need to know anything about his life before.

When they’d found their newest member, Beauregard, Molly saw a guarded anger in her that was familiar to him. He enjoyed prodding her, but she also genuinely made him laugh. Also, he couldn’t help but notice the way she and Yasha behaved around each other—they weren’t exactly subtle. When he saw the smile on Yasha’s face as she watched Beau, he wondered if her years of solitude might finally be over.

As they drank and danced in the club, Molly realized with a moment of clarity, the strange self-reflection that sometimes comes from a night of great hilarity, that he had never been so happy in his entire life. The decades stretched out behind him, but whatever was in store in the future, everything he’d lived was worth it just for this one night with these people.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> molly: hahaha its great being treated like french royalty in the year 1788  
> robespierre: >:0
> 
> thank you to my beta comfortcharacters!!! and thanks for all your comments everyone!


	10. Chapter 10

As she lay there, waiting for Molly to return, Beau began to pick at her bonds. There were only two of them in the room now, but the ropes were tight and she was the only one who was still conscious.

She wriggled, trying to free herself from captivity. She wished she had a knife or something, but—

Beau looked over at Yasha. Did she still have any of her blades on her? If they were smart, they would have disarmed her, but maybe they hadn’t had time. Subtly, she tried to maneuver her hands so she could look under Yasha’s bulky cloak and see if there was any chance she traveled with an extra sword.

As she moved, she heard a throat being cleared from the hall. With a start, she realized Caduceus was standing there. He looked unharmed and cheerful, and she stared at him with utter bemusement.

“I don’t recall welcoming you gentlemen into our home,” Caduceus said in a gentle tone.

The two men in the room looked at him with confusion, and took aim with their tranquilizer guns.

Before they had a chance to move, each of them sank to the floor, a bolt buried in the base of their skulls. Beau looked up in shock and saw Nott popping out of a ventilation shaft she hadn’t even noticed near the ceiling of the room, bearing a heavy-duty crossbow in one hand. She jumped nimbly down to the floor and began working on Beau’s bonds. Caduceus entered the room, kneeling next to the men to close their eyes.

“Molly told us where to find you. Fuck, these are good knots,” Nott said. She pulled a small knife out of her belt. “Sorry if I stab you.”

Beau almost laughed. “Thanks, guys.”

There was a sound like a thunderbolt, and Beau looked up at the door she’d glanced away from. Another guard, looking alarmed, had a gun raised in front of him. This one looked less like a tranquilizer. As Caduceus knelt in front of them, he suddenly slumped forward, red blooming across his chest.

“Caddy!” Nott said. She took aim with her crossbow, ducking around Beau to try to reach the corner of the room. Beau tugged against the remnants of her bonds to try to put her arms in front of her, although she knew that if that gun fired her arms wouldn’t do her much good.

Suddenly, before either the guard or Nott could take aim again, the vision in front of her erupted in a wave of fire and heat. The guard screamed as he was suddenly engulfed in a stream of concentrated flame, skin cracking and burning before their eyes. Beau’s eyes widened in horror in the sight in front of her as what had been the man’s body collapsed.

Caleb stood before them, flamethrower in hand. As he stared down at the burning corpse, his eyes looked distant and blank.

“Caleb?!” Nott said frantically. Caleb didn’t respond. She rushed over to him, tugging on his arm, and he allowed her to lead him past the body but didn’t otherwise react to his presence. “Shit.” She patted his arm but then turned to Yasha, Fjord, and Jester, still lying immobile on the floor. Caduceus’s body was still on the floor, although she heard him groaning slightly.

“How did they catch us unawares?!” she muttered under her breath. She returned to Beau’s tied wrists and ankles, and Beau could feel them loosening as she cut away.

Beau saw a shadow fall across the doorway, and quickly said, “Nott!” There was a chilling laugh, and the huge man—Lorenzo—stepped past the body of his fallen companion. A half dozen more guards were behind him, and Beau felt a surge of panic within her. Half of them were incapacitated, and the majority of their attackers were still untouched.

Beau ripped her arms in front of her and leaped to her feet as her bonds finally came away, Nott reaching up with her crossbow. Caleb was still standing unmoving, eyes empty.

Two shots rang out. Beau looked down at her shoulder to see a tranquilizer dart, which she ripped out. Another quickly took its place, but she ripped that out too. She looked beside her to see Nott fall backwards, red dot in the center of her forehead and Lorenzo holding a smoking gun.

Seeing his friend fall seemed to bring something back in Caleb, and he roared with anger, bringing the flamethrower up and a jet of fire beginning to pour out towards Lorenzo.

Barely even looking at him, Lorenzo fired another shot, and Caleb too fell to the floor with a bullet to the head, flame sputtering out as his dead hands slipped from the trigger.

Beau could feel her vision becoming woozy. She couldn’t believe how quickly these guys had taken them down. Sure, their attackers had used the element of surprise, but who _were_ these guys?

As Beau staggered, trying to bring up her fists but her vision blurring, Lorenzo smiled at her. “Such pointless bravery,” he said. “I thought you were supposed to be trained warriors.”

Beau growled, but the sound was weak. It was getting harder to stand by the second.

As she tried to lurch forward, determined to go down fighting at the very least, there was a quiet sound like a groan from the back of the group. She looked at one of the guards she was facing, and there was a sword sliding across his neck. Another fell shortly after, and she recognized the colorful robe and twirling scimitars. Molly.

Lorenzo let out an angry sound and whirled around, and Beau used the opportunity to push herself forward. She collapsed onto the ground as she tried to walk, but it didn’t matter. She reached what she was looking for. The tranquilizer gun of one of the guards Nott had killed. With unsteady hands, she brought it up, using the last of her strength to fire again and again. Even though her eyes kept slipping closed, she was sure she’d hit at least a few of them.

She forced her eyes open again to see Molly sliding through another guard easily. He was close to Lorenzo now, the guards still scrambling to fight both Molly and Beau at the same time. Beau knew she must have hit Lorenzo with at least one dart, but he was so huge it was taking time to bring him down. Molly knocked him in the head with the butt of a sword, and he reeled backwards, giving Molly a chance to push into the room.

He stood between their attackers and the Mighty Nein, most incapacitated and lying on the ground. Beau, on one knee, struggled to keep the gun raised, and Molly gave her a pleased look. “You did good, newbie,” he said with a smile. Something in it looked tired.

Lorenzo was still recovering from knock to the head, but he raised his gun. Molly rushed towards him, but there was a gunshot. Even after several had rung out into the room, they were still impossibly loud. Molly staggered backwards, clutching his stomach, but he still managed to use the rest of his momentum to take down the only other guard who remained standing. He fell to the ground next to Lorenzo.

Lorenzo kicked at Molly with his foot, rolling him onto his stomach. Molly coughed, a trickle of blood coming out of the corner of his mouth. “You know, they told me you were hard to kill,” Lorenzo said. “Let’s see if we can put that to the test.”

He fired again, not into Molly’s head but putting another bullet into his stomach. Molly lurched in pain as blood spattered back onto Lorenzo, but Molly was still breathing faintly.

Beau heard a low muttering next to her. The tranquilizer was still keeping her down, but she felt like something inside her was keeping it from putting her to sleep just yet. Maybe something in her healing or immortality was fighting it. She wondered faintly how many darts it had taken to put the others down.

The muttering increased in volume. She looked over, her line of sight swimming, to see Caleb was on his feet again. Lorenzo hadn’t noticed as he pressed his foot down on Molly’s gunshot wounds, smiling widely as he watched Molly squirm in pain. Caleb had a look of rage on his face that Beau had never seen on a person before. Looking around at the bodies of their fallen friends and seeing Beau at the point of collapse, he raised the flamethrower once more.

“Get the fuck out of our house,” Caleb said, pulling the trigger.

Lorenzo, eyes widening in shock and sudden horror, tried to dive out of the way, but it was too slow. Whatever he’d been told, maybe it had been too much to imagine that they really could take a bullet to the brain and be standing again moments later. Nott and Caduceus were finally getting to their feet as well, and Nott buried a bolt in Lorenzo even as the flame engulfed him. There was a horrifying scream and then the stench of burning flesh filled the air as Lorenzo’s huge body collapsed.

Beau crawled forward, desperate to reach Molly. Even as she moved, little things were coming together. That slightly sad look on Molly’s face as he stood against Lorenzo, the rest of them incapacitated. Him suddenly seeming thoughtful and quiet in the morning.

Finally, the last piece slotted into place. It was just a little thing, but it crashed down on her like something momentous. Why had he been wearing gloves all day after injuring his palms the night before? Except… to hide from the rest of them that the scrapes weren’t going away?

Molly was lying flat on his back, two bullet wounds in his torso. She knew just from glancing at them and from the look of Molly’s pallid skin that there was no point asking the others for help. Even so, she couldn’t help but call out. “Caduceus!” she said in an urgent tone.

Molly gripped her wrist with surprising strength. “It’s… fine…” he spat out, blood dripping from the corners of his mouth.

Beau gripped his hand with both of hers, kneeling next to him. “Why?” she asked.

Molly let out a short, barking laugh. “If knowing I could die stopped me from protecting my friends, I wouldn’t be much of a hero, would I?”

“You didn’t have to be a fucking hero,” Beau said in a thick voice. She couldn’t help the tears that were sliding down her cheeks.

Molly shrugged faintly, although the motion looked painful. Beau realized that the members of the group who were awake were slowly gathering around them as she clutched his hand even tighter. "Yeah, but who else was going to steal your thunder?”

She couldn’t even smile at the weak joke as tears continued to flow down her cheeks. Nott and Caleb took places next to Molly, and Caduceus knelt down by Beau, gently pulling Molly’s head onto his lap so he could rest more comfortably.

“Thank you, Mollymauk,” Caleb said. “You have saved us all.”

Molly coughed again, wincing, and Beau could feel the blood soaking into her pants as she knelt beside him. “Oh well,” Molly breathed, voice becoming very faint. “Nothing really does last forever, huh?”

His eyes never slid shut as his life finally faded. Beau couldn’t precisely describe it, but there was simply a moment where Molly wasn’t there anymore. She leaned over, still clutching his hand tightly, and felt the tranquilizer finally overcome her as she slumped to her side, unconscious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'll... escort myself out... : ' )
> 
> (thanks a million to comfortcharacters supporting me through trying to write an action scene <3)


	11. Interlude - Yasha

Yasha felt like her life had begun and ended under a slate-gray sky, stretching so far it took her breath away to think about it. The sky was the first memory she had, and she felt that however many years in the future it would take, it would probably be her last.

She no longer had any memory of her parents’ faces, but she did remember the land where she was born. The empty, frozen mountain lands. Even as a girl, she’d wandered out into the wilderness—knowing it was dangerous, but so tempted to see the beautiful natural sights. Besides, even when she was young, there were few things more dangerous than Yasha.

Her tribe was one of many, wandering the icy landscape, raising animals and hunting for food. The men often went across the seas for months at a time, and when she was young she spent her time caring for her family’s home and engaging in sporting contests with the other children. These were often violent or tests of strength, and from an early age she honed her natural abilities. As a woman, she wasn’t permitted to join the ranks of the warriors, but she was still respected for her power.

In what Caleb told her was probably the late tenth century—she hadn’t really been paying attention, at the time—she crossed the oceans with her entire tribe. They were setting up a new society in a new land, and so it was time at last for all of them to travel together. Caleb had recited some factoids from one of his books about the Viking settlements in Greenland, but even now the names of peoples and countries mattered little to her. She remembered months on the open sea, at the mercy of the most dangerous whims of nature. She remembered when the world was much less clearly divided, and it still felt like there were truly wild places.

This new land was different than the old one, but her life was much the same. She was caring for her animals and the land. It was a farmer’s life. A part of her itched to fight, to ride the boats with the men, but there was another part of her that loved the calm and quiet life that staying home permitted her. Although working in their village took up a lot of her time, and the work was difficult, there were still days when the work was done early and she could just walk through the chilled air. There was something about the freshness and clarity that a deep breath of cold air could bring that nothing else could replicate.

Even back then, Yasha had been intimidating to others in the tribe. She cultivated certain parts of it intentionally, even. She knew she was tall, muscled, and could hold her own in a fight. Her cold eyes unsettled some. But there was one woman who had never been afraid of her.

More than a millennium later, Yasha still had a hard time talking about Zuala. The faces of so many others had come and gone, but she still dreamed of her wife’s face almost every night. So many things reminded her of Zuala. A woman’s brown eyes across a room. Flowers, especially in bright colors. The sky.

Yasha had watched Zuala from afar for a long time, almost since childhood. The other girl had been headstrong, confident, loud, and so utterly beautiful. Zuala was one of the only other children who could stand against Yasha in a fight, but she didn’t seem to have any of the same troubles with socializing as Yasha did. Everyone loved her.

Zuala had laughed, a big belly laugh, when Yasha told her this. Yasha had blushed, hiding behind a curtain of hair, but Zuala just took her in her arms. “I was always watching you, too,” Zuala confided. Yasha remembered the surge of love in her heart, so strong it would last a thousand years.

It was when the men were gone that it happened. Yasha and Zuala were on a hunt together, trusted to be such a powerful force as a duo that they needed no others for support. Women didn’t do much hunting, but it was a time of scarcity so they had little choice. They had just taken down a huge beast, an animal that Yasha was still unfamiliar with in their new home but that looked like it would feed many.

As the thrill of the hunt came to its peak and the beast fell, Zuala leaped into Yasha’s arms, and Yasha spun her around, feeling more like a giddy child than she had in many years. They were both laughing and holding each other, and then suddenly Zuala’s mouth found hers and Yasha was embracing her, leaning down to hold the shorter woman tightly.

They found every excuse to be together after that. Their relationship wasn’t particularly hidden from the tribe, but the depths of their attachment to each other had to be. They knew full well when the men returned they would both be married to others, the choice of mate up to their families. The idea of being married to someone other than each other was a nightmare, but it would be a grave crime against their families and the tribe to do otherwise.

The two of them knew they only had a few months before the men returned, so they spent every spare moment together. Yasha still remembered the warm feeling of waking up in Zuala’s arms. It was a comfort she had only experienced once in her life.

Every period of Yasha’s life felt brief because of the length of it. Even a century was but a blip after more than a thousand years alive. But that time with Zuala felt both like the longest and shortest part of her life. Long because the memories were still so strong after all this time. Other people were blurred, but the vision of Zuala was as sharp as if Yasha had seen her only moments ago. Short because after Yasha had tasted true happiness, it felt like it was gone in an instant never to return.

The men came back, and Yasha and Zuala were promised to be wed. She barely knew the man, but it wasn’t him that was causing her such pain. It was the fact that he was not Zuala. She knew they had no choice, but the thought of being ripped from Zuala’s arms and thrust into a stranger’s felt so painful that she wondered if death might be better.

She whispered this to Zuala one night, only a few days before they were to be separated. Zuala, holding Yasha in her arms, had kissed the top of Yasha’s head and whispered the same.

The idea had come to both of them at the same time. If they were in agreement that death might be better than marriage, why not take a risk? If they ran away together, the worst that would happen is that they might be killed for their betrayal of the tribe. Did they not both agree that the possibility of death was more than worth the possibility of keeping this happiness?

So, in the early hours of the morning, on the day of Yasha’s wedding, the two of them met on the outskirts of the town, joined hands, and ran into the wilderness.

Realistically, Yasha knew that they both must have known it wouldn’t last. Thinking back on it, she knew even in her youth she knew the reality of the situation. But all she remembered of that time was the freedom, the love, and the happiness. The two of them together couldn’t last forever, but they were finally free of the shackles they’d endured for so long. They held their own wedding out in the frozen fields, keeping on the move and with only each other’s company. It was enough. It was more than enough.

Just like she had known, it didn’t last. Not even a few months had passed before they were discovered. She and Zuala had lived less than a year together before they were ripped apart.

They fought it, which might have been another mistake, but she could never have done anything else. She and Zuala took down many in their bid to escape capture, and perhaps that sealed their fate. But like they had agreed in the night, they were ready to die rather than be forced to live apart.

There was a trial, in which Yasha stared into the faces of so many who she had grown up with before they condemned her and Zuala to death for their crimes. They were next to each other, staring into each other’s eyes, when it happened. Yasha’s last memory of Zuala’s face was reaching out towards her wife as the executioner raised the axe above Yasha’s neck.

Yasha had believed for a long time that the life she had been given was somehow a punishment for her crimes in life. When she’d woken beneath the ground, head reattached to her body, she had screamed through the dirt filling her mouth. It had taken her hours to claw her way back to the surface.

In some strange semblance of hope, she had ripped into Zuala’s grave, praying for her wife’s life beneath it. But it was only a corpse beneath the earth. Zuala stayed dead, while Yasha was given eternal life.

In all of their musings together, they had never discussed the possibility that one of them would live while the other would die. It was too painful.

Then came the period of her life that Yasha did not remember. She had stumbled out into the wilderness, covered in dirt and blood, and where she had gone and what she had done she could not recall. She only knew that countless years had passed when she blinked back into reality in the freezing rain. As she sat in the middle of the raging storm, she no longer feared death nor longed for it. She felt so distant from her humanity that she might as well have been a part of the storm itself.

Even after coming back to herself, Yasha spent several centuries wandering the isolated wilderness. She would come across a settlement from time to time, but she always avoided them. She felt that perhaps she was not meant to be around others in her new cursed life. Others might have been driven mad by the extended separation from other people, but silence had always comforted Yasha. She didn’t think, she just acted on instinct. Planning for the future meant nothing, as she would simply continue to exist no matter what happened.

Caleb had found some records of her, in his hobby of tracing their existences back through time. Some old legends mentioned a figure who resembled her, saving a drowning child or giving food to a starving village. She didn’t recall specific instances anymore, but she couldn’t deny that some of the carvings bore an uncanny resemblance.

It was only when she dreamt of the man that she finally considered an end to her solitary existence. He was alone, voice gone and mind blank. His misery called to her, and in the end she decided she simply could not allow him to suffer alone.

It was uncomfortable to reintegrate herself with people. She had almost forgotten what it was like to hold a conversation after so long with the animals of the land as her only companions. Even as a youth, she had never been good with people, and the years of isolation only worsened that. Still, she managed to find a ship taking her across the sea once more. She left the land that had been her home, and that had taken everything from her.

It was like something within her was pulling her towards him. When she saw him on the street, looking as though he didn’t even see the people around him, she took him with her. She didn’t know what her dreams were trying to tell her, but it felt like the right thing to do.

She never would have predicted the kind of person Molly would grow to be. He was loud, overconfident, brashly charismatic and yet utterly unbearable. She would never forget Zuala, but over time he had a place deep in her heart. In a way, this terrified her, because she knew more than anyone how dangerous it was to care for others so deeply. But with so many years together, she was either going to grow to love or to hate Molly. And as much as he might try to earn it, she could never hate him.

He wasn’t anything like Zuala, although his sharp wit and boisterous laugh vaguely reminded her of her wife on occasion. He was less of a rock to lean on and more a river who could sweep you away if you weren’t careful.

The rest of the Mighty Nein, when they came along, were more people than she’d been surrounded with since childhood. She often didn’t know how to interact with them, wandering off into nature whenever she had a chance just to feel like herself. But there were parts of each of them that were isolated from the rest of the world, just like her. The nature of their existence was isolating, but they were learning to be with each other.

When Nott and Jester brought her flowers for her to put inside Zuala’s book, for the day someday in the future when she would return to her wife’s grave, something inside her softened that had been stuck for hundreds of years.

Once or twice, when they slept in the same tent, she noticed when her nightmares shook her into consciousness that she wasn’t the only one lying awake.

Yasha hadn’t really danced with another person since Zuala. At small events in their village, and then with only Zuala’s singing when they’d been alone—it was a wonderful thing, to dance with someone you loved. Molly had persuaded her into a few social dances, but she hardly counted swaying nearby while he made a fool of himself as dancing.

So she surprised herself when it only took a little bit of liquid courage to extend her hand to Beau. She had found herself watching Beau the same way she remembered watching Zuala. Admiring her strength, her passion, her stubborn power. Beau was even further from Zuala than Molly was, but something about her brought up feelings in Yasha that she hadn’t felt in so long. A small part of her wondered if it was a betrayal of her wife’s memory, but a much larger part—a part that had a voice that reminded her of Molly—wondered if it might not be better to try to be happy again.

Molly had come to her room late that night, still half-drunk and about to pass out. Although wobbling, he handed her an iris he’d found growing in the sidewalk in front of their safehouse. She’d pressed it into the book with a smile.

“Go to bed, Molly,” she’d said. He’d nodded, and without ceremony collapsed into her bed.

She sighed and took off his shoes, tucking him into bed as she’d done many times before. The bed was more than big enough for the two of them, so she’d slipped into slumber easily enough with the sound of his breathing beside her. The memory of Beau’s arms around her as they danced was still warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oof. Sorry for the even more pain--and I can't promise relief in the NEAR future--but happy times will come again, believe me!
> 
> thank you to comfortcharacters for enduring me screaming about yasha for hours!!


	12. Chapter 12

Beau awoke slowly, eyes blinking open before her mind had a chance to catch up with them. There were faces swimming above her, but she didn’t recognize them. For a moment, she felt like a child again, looking up at her parents standing over her.

She blinked again, and an anxious-looking Caduceus swam into view. “Beau?” he said quietly. “Are you quite all right?”

She nodded, sitting up. The events of the last few moments she’d been awake came back in a rush, and she looked down at her hands, covered in blood that was now dry.

He was lying under a sheet a few feet away. She could see the line of his body under the tarp, and it felt so incredibly wrong to see him still like that when he’d been so full of life.

She looked around her. Caleb and Nott were sitting nearby, Nott gently rubbing his shoulder. Caduceus had moved on to Jester and Fjord, who were stirring. Yasha still lay on the ground, unmoving.

“Give her this,” Caduceus said, handing Beau some kind of liquid. Numbly, she knelt by Yasha and dripped it into her mouth, trying to tilt her head to make it go down more easily. A few hours ago, being this close to her would have made Beau’s heart speed up, but right now the only thing in the room she could pay attention to was the body on the ground.

As she drank whatever Caduceus had given her, Yasha stirred slightly. Like Beau had done, her eyes blinked open and she looked unaware of her surroundings.

“Yasha,” Beau said very quietly. “Are you all right?”

“…Zuala?” Yasha said faintly. She blinked a few more times, and furrowed her brow. “Yes, I am all right. Beau.”

Beau decided not to ask and helped Yasha sit up as Caduceus helped Fjord do the same. She suddenly realized what Yasha was about to see, and wished there was something she could do to prepare her. But what could she say? There was nothing she could do to change the truth.

Beau could see the second Yasha’s eyes focused on the still form, face going stiff and cold. Yasha got to her feet shakily and took a few steps towards it. Caleb and Nott were watching too, but no one seemed to have a word to say.

Yasha fell to her knees next to the body, and with a trembling hand lifted up the sheet. Her face, already pale, was icy white. As she fell back against the ground, shaking, she let out a shattering scream of anguish, tears beginning to stream down her face.

She got to her feet, all of the members of the group watching her. As quickly as it had come, the rush of emotion that had crossed her features was gone. She looked colder and more aloof than Beau had ever seen her, but the tear tracks on her face were still dripping down.

“It happened again,” Yasha murmured. She took a few steps away from the body, and then in a rush walked out of the room. Beau moved to get to her feet, but Caduceus shook his head.

“Give her some time,” Caduceus said. Beau nodded.

Fjord was awake now, staring somberly down at the body. With a cry, Jester was the last to awaken. She yawned and stretched as if waking from a long slumber, but when she opened her eyes and took in all of their expressions, it took only a moment for her eyes to fixate on the corpse.

Jester gasped and her hands flew to her mouth in horror. Tears began flowing freely down her face as she looked, and she embraced Fjord. The two of them looked down at Molly’s body, Jester’s cries becoming louder and louder. Barely a word had been spoken, but there was an air of unspeakable loss in the atmosphere unlike any that Beau had ever felt. Having only known him for a short time, she couldn’t imagine what each of them was experiencing, and she herself felt pain and regret beyond anything she’d ever experienced.

“We should bury him,” Beau finally said. It was only because she couldn’t bear the silence any longer, the oppressive cloud of misery that his body brought.

“Yes,” Jester agreed. She had finally stopped weeping, but her eyes looked tired.

“I will do it,” Yasha said. Beau’s head jerked around to see her standing in the doorframe.

“Yasha?” Fjord said cautiously.

“I will bury him. Alone,” Yasha said in a tone that permitted no argument.

She walked over to Molly’s body, still half-covered in the sheet. With ease, she lifted him, his head lolling back as if he were a small child. Beau could see blood already getting all over Yasha’s clothes, but the tall woman paid no attention. She carried him outside, and Beau got to her feet and followed numbly. She heard shuffling footsteps of the others doing the same.

Yasha lay Molly’s body down in the grass, the vestiges of dusk still visible over the trees. She placed him gently in the last sunny patch in the yard. Less than an hour ago, Beau had been sitting calmly at their kitchen table. That was another world now.

Fjord returned with a shovel and handed it to Yasha. They all watched her as she began to dig into the earth, each stab into the dirt fueled by rage and pain. She was vicious, tearing into the earth with ferocity, but a few tears still tracked their way down her cheeks along with the sweat. Beau felt helpless, but all she could do was watch.

The sun had long set by the time Yasha finished. The light of the stars and from inside the house was just enough to see the grave by. None of them seemed able to move or speak for hours, until Jester finally broke the silence.

“We don’t have a coffin,” she said in a small voice.

“He doesn’t need one,” Yasha said. “I do not want him to feel trapped.”

She was talking about him like he was still alive, Beau realized.

Jester was sniffling again. “Yes,” she agreed. “He should be free.”

They all walked over to the hole as Yasha gently placed Molly next to it. His eyes were still open, but Yasha did not seem to want to close them. It was his last defiance to death—he would look it in the face.

Fjord cleared his throat as Yasha climbed out. “Uh, would anyone like to say a few words?” His voice sounded different somehow, but Beau didn’t have the energy to contemplate how.

They looked to Yasha, but she was silent. Her eyes were just staring at Molly. Fjord sighed, and stepped forward.

“We’ll never know anyone like you again, Molly,” he said. He pulled out Molly’s swords and gently placed them, crossing them over Molly’s chest.

“More his style than flowers, anyway,” Nott said.

"We’ll miss you, Molly,” Jester said tearfully.

“Thank you, Mollymauk,” Caleb said, face seeming tight and voice even more quiet than usual. “Shine bright.”

Beau realized that she hadn’t spoken. It felt wrong, in a way, to speak in front of all these people who had known him so much better and longer than she had. But she also felt that she had to speak. She still had his blood on her hands, and it had been her that he had saved. But more than that, just this afternoon they’d been playing cards and bickering. If they’d had longer…

In one motion, she knelt next to his body. She put a hand over his just as she had as he died. “Molly,” she said, voice raspy. “You’re a fucking asshole, for dying like a hero. How are the rest of us supposed to go on, after that? We’re all gonna look like backup for the main event.”

She paused, breath shuddering in and out. “We’re going to find out who did this. And we’ll kill them for you.” She looked around at the other members of the Mighty Nein, who had hard stares fixed in the distance, and knew they felt the same rage she did.

“I know it doesn’t mean much, but… it’s all I can do to thank you.” Her voice was barely audible through the tears that had come over her again. “Thank you, Molly.” Her words felt so woefully inadequate, but she could barely speak. She backed up, allowing Yasha and Fjord to lift the body into the grave.

All of the group began to move the dirt into the hole. It fell over Molly’s colorful clothes, coating them in darkness, and Jester began to cry again. She had to walk a few feet away and crouch down, tears wracking her frame. Beau walked over to her and knelt next to her, rubbing circles on Jester’s back in the same way she’d seen Fjord do.

“Thanks, Beau,” Jester said in the quietest voice Beau had ever heard from her. She leaned over and hugged Beau tightly, squeezing her. Beau could feel Jester shaking against her, and she felt herself shaking too. She tightened her grip on the other woman, leaning her head into Jester’s shoulder.

It didn’t take long for the grave to be full again. Caduceus lay his hands over it, whispering a prayer that only he could hear.

“When we come back next I’ll plant something,” he murmured to Yasha, putting a hand gently on her shoulder. “Something colorful.”

She nodded her thanks, face unmoving.

They all filed back into the house, unsure of what to do. Beau felt as though someone needed to say something, lighten this impossible tension somehow, but the person who could have done so best was gone.

Nott opened a bottom cabinet in the kitchen as they all stood there. She pulled out a huge bottle of whiskey and selection of glasses. “Anyone for a drink?”

Even Jester and Caduceus accepted a little bit of whiskey. Nott poured out the drinks, and they all nodded and raised their glasses.

Beau felt like they ought to say something. Then, something came to her. The story of Molly pretending to be a king, just for fun. Just to enjoy life a little bit more.

“Long may he reign,” Beau said, glass raised.

“Long may he reign,” chorused the rest of the Mighty Nein. Yasha didn’t speak, but she looked deeply into her glass before she drained it in one gulp.

It was hours into the night, all of them sitting around the living room and drinking, before someone spoke again.

“We missed our rendezvous with Essek,” Caleb said quietly.

Beau snorted. “Isn’t it obvious? He rendezvoused with us all right. What a beautiful reception.”

Caleb considered it. “It is a possibility, but I have no idea what his motive would be. And he does not know what we are.”

“Perhaps he’s discovered us,” Fjord said. “It’s too dangerous to meet with him now, anyways.”

“I don’t think it was Essek,” Jester said with a sad look. “I don’t think he would do that to us, do you? Caleb?”

Caleb sighed. “I do not wish to believe it, but… ja, as I said, it is a possibility.”

Beau leaned forward in the armchair she was sprawled out in. “We have to get out of town. Tonight. Before they realized whatever they were trying to do didn’t work.”

“Beau is right,” Nott said. “Caddy, are you okay to drive?”

Caduceus, who had only had one small sip of whiskey, nodded.

They packed up their things in somber silence. When she walked into her room, Beau saw the red dress she’d tried to lay out for Jester on her bed. It felt impossible that it was only from the night before.

She gathered it up, wishing it was slightly less wrinkled and then feeling stupid for caring. Beau knocked on Jester’s door. She tried to be gentle but the knock still seemed to resound down the empty hall.

“…Yes?” came a small, tearful-sounding voice from within.

“Hey, uh…” Beau tried to find her voice, but Jester was already opening the door. Her face brightened when she saw the dress Beau was holding.

“Oh! Thanks, Beau!” she said, an echo of her earlier smiles on her face. “Do you wanna come in for a sec?”

“Okay,” Beau said. It wasn’t like she had much to pack, anyway. She stepped inside Jester’s small room, which was painted pink and decorated with lots of pictures of animals and frilly pillows. Jester was packing an equally pink suitcase with some clothes.

“Come here,” Jester said. She pulled a small box out of the bottom of the suitcase. “I want to show you something.”

“…Yeah?” Beau said, approaching. Jester sounded more calm than earlier, but her cheer and energy from the morning was gone. Of course, it wasn’t like Beau had expected any different. But it was still odd to experience.

Jester opened the box. There were several bundles of aged paper inside, tied with string and sealed in laminated packages. She reached into the bottom of the box, and pulled out a single piece of paper, larger than the rest.

She unfurled it, and Beau saw what looked like a child’s painting of a woman with dark hair and a beautiful smile. Even though it was clearly done by someone young, the artist was talented. The brushstrokes captured the woman’s expression perfectly—loving, cheerful, but slightly mournful.

“This was my mama,” Jester said.

“She’s beautiful,” Beau said.

“Yes, she was so beautiful,” Jester said wistfully. She delicately swiped a finger over the figure’s face, as if to cradle her face. “I miss her every day.”

“I’m sorry,” Beau said. “I… You’ve been through a lot, huh?”

“We all have,” Jester said. “But that isn’t why I wanted to show you this. You might think it’s silly, because you’re still so new to this. But today reminded me that… we don’t have forever, you know?”

Beau nodded, unsure of where this was going.

“Think about how you want to say goodbye to your parents, Beau,” Jester said. “You probably don’t have too many years before they’ll notice. I didn’t get to pick my goodbye, but you still get yours.”

The words hit Beau like a physical blow. She stepped backwards, away from Jester and the picture.

“I don’t need to see my parents again,” Beau spat.

Jester nodded. “That’s okay if it’s true, but just make sure it is, okay?”

Beau sighed. She wanted to be angry, but somehow after the day they’d had, she just didn’t have it in her. “Okay.” She walked to the doorframe and opened the door to the hall. “…Thanks, Jess.”

Beau felt a pair of surprisingly strong arms encircle her from behind, and Jester gave her a squeezing hug so tight she felt it lift her off the ground half an inch or so. “Anytime!” Jester said brightly, putting her down. Her smile was back, now, but it looked less confident than the ones from before.

Beau grabbed her things and made her way back, as the rest of the group did the same. They all carried light bags, Jester’s pink suitcase looking like the most belongings anyone was carrying. She supposed for this kind of life, you had to travel without much.

“So… van?” Beau said. “Do we have another one?”

“There’s one in the garage,” Nott said. “Different color. Should be fine.”

“Ja, let’s go,” Caleb said, looking anxiously around. She couldn’t blame him.

Yasha was the last in, carrying barely anything. Before they could walk towards the garage, she walked back out towards the yard.

Beau looked at the rest of the group. “Give us a minute,” she said, and followed Yasha.

Yasha was, as she had expected, kneeling by Molly’s grave. She had her sword out, buried in the ground next to the mound of earth, and was leaning her head against it, hands wrapped around the handle.

Yasha had said hardly a word since waking up, but Beau heard her speaking softly now. She walked a few steps closer to hear.

“I knew Zuala for less than a year, and Molly for more than five centuries,” Yasha said softly. “But it hurts the same. When it someone you truly love, it does not matter.”

Beau knelt next to her, putting her hand gently on Yasha’s back between her shoulder blades. She felt the other woman shaking, but she just kept her hand there, feeling Yasha’s cold skin slowly warm under her touch.

She didn’t know how long they sat there, but eventually, Yasha leaned back and slowly took to her feet. She pulled her sword out of the ground, wiping the earth from it before she stowed it once more on her back.

Yasha gave Beau a deep, searching look. Beau wondered what it was she was seeing, but Yasha didn’t say anything else before walking back towards the house. Beau followed.

“Let’s go,” Yasha said quietly. The rest seemed surprised to hear her talk again, but they all nodded, and the group headed towards the garage.

As they rolled up the door, someone cleared their throat behind the group. As if with one movement, they all seized their weapons and whirled around. A man stood there, his form slender and tall in the moonlight.

“Hold!” Caleb called out. “Who is it?”

The man walked forward, the slender lines of his face catching the moonlight. He had brown skin and a shock of white hair, which might have been dyed or natural. His clothes were mostly covered by a long black coat.

“Essek!” Jester said with joy in her voice, but then she paused and raised her axe again. Beau stared at the man. For all she’d heard about him, he didn’t look like much.

“The Mighty Nein,” Essek said.

“Back up,” Nott warned. “We’ve already been attacked once tonight, and we have our thoughts about who might be responsible.”

Essek frowned, looking confused. “But—I too was attacked tonight. I seek your aid, and I fear my plans have been uncovered. Please, allow me at least to explain myself.”

Beau frowned, but he sounded convincing. Either he was an accomplished liar or he was telling the truth—but she didn’t know him well, so she couldn’t tell for sure.

“So who’s behind it, then, if it’s not you?” Fjord said, doubt evident in his voice.

Essek’s face tightened. “I am not sure, but I have my suspects. There are few who knew enough to know where I was, much less you.”

“If they knew where we were, it’s because of you,” Nott said, crossbow still held on the man. “By the way, how did _you_ find us?”

Essek sighed. “I did have my spy track you, but only to ensure your safety. I was aware that I was being watched, but I was not aware of how closely. If my actions led our attackers to you, I am deeply sorry.”

Jester sniffled. “Molly’s dead, Essek.”

“He’s…” Essek’s face clenched as if he were in pain, and then smoothed out just as quickly. “I’m very sorry to hear that. If there’s anything I can do…”

“It might be best if we go our separate ways for a while,” Fjord said, voice calm but firm.

“No, please, at least hear me out,” Essek pleaded. He took a step closer to them, and several of the Mighty Nein lowered their weapons slightly. “There’s information you need to know.”

“Let’s take him with us,” Jester said. “If we don’t like what he says, we kick him out of the van, okay?” She shrugged, and Beau was reminded of how vicious she could be on occasion.

Fjord looked over Essek. “…Fine with me,” he finally said.

The rest of the group nodded their assent, and they finished piling all of their belongings into the vehicle. They clambered into the back, and Essek took his seat amongst the rest of them, next to Caleb. The two of them shared a look.

Beau tried not to glare too hard at Essek, not sure she enjoyed the intrusion into their space. She slumped to a seating position next to Yasha, who nodded to her.

Caleb took a deep breath. “My friend, you had better explain yourself.” He patted Essek on the shoulder gently, and Essek nodded. Unlike the rest of them, he looked odd sitting against the wall of the van. His proper attire and wing-tipped shoes would have looked much more in place at a business luncheon than among mercenaries.

“Of course,” Essek said with a nod.

“Which direction am I going?” Caduceus called back to them, beginning to pull out of the cul-de-sac.

“Well…” Essek said. “If you agree with what I’m saying, then towards the airport. I have a plane waiting there. If not, then wherever you like, I suppose.”

Nott glanced around at the rest of them. “Maybe we start heading there, and we can always turn around?” Caleb nodded, and the rest of the group murmured in agreement.

Caduceus began to drive, and all their eyes returned to Essek. Now that Beau got a closer look at him, even in the dim light of passing streetlights, she could see he didn’t look great. There was a thin sheen of sweat on his brow, and his eyes looked tired.

“I was doing some work for Ludinus Da’leth,” Essek started.

Caleb sucked in air through his teeth, expression pained. “In Homeland Security?” he said in a harsh, low tone.

“The _government?!”_ Nott shrieked. “Essek, what the fuck?!”

“He’s corrupt,” Essek said, hands out in a placating gesture. “He was working with a few members of my organization, and I began to speak with him that way.”

Beau snorted. “So the fact that he’s government _and_ shady is supposed to make us feel better about this, how?”

Essek looked at her. “Excuse me, who are you?”

“This is Beauregard,” Caleb said. “She is the newest member of our group.”

“…Pleasure,” Essek said, fixing her with a cool look. He sighed and continued. “I know it was not smart to talk to him, but we had been researching… many of the same things. I thought he could help me, but I was wrong. I believe he is the one who betrayed me, and by extension, you.”

“So what does he want?” Fjord asked. “What’s this research?”

Essek sighed. “I’m looking into a collection of stolen artifacts, most of them perhaps one thousand years old or more. One statue, in particular. It was stolen from its home, and it is worth a fairly spectacular sum.”

“And why does Homeland Security care about this?” Nott demanded.

“They don’t,” Essek said simply. “But Ludinus does. I’m fairly certain he’s in it only for the money, but I have a slightly more vested interest.”

“Vested interest?” Caleb asked.

Essek sighed. “I would like to see them returned. Call me sentimental, but a few are from Bihar. My birthplace,” he said, clarifying to Beau.

“Forgive me, Essek,” Caduceus said from the front seat, calling back as he passed rows of identical houses. “But I don’t typically hear you expressing such sentiment.”

There was doubt evident in Caduceus’s voice, and Beau gave Essek a suspicious look.

Essek smiled slyly. “Oh, I intend to sell the rest, and just return the few,” he clarified.

“That sounds more like you,” Jester giggled.

“They are this valuable? That Ludinus Da’leth… he is trying to kill you?” Caleb broke in.

“And us?” Yasha said. Her face was pained, and Beau realized that the night finally made far too much sense. Their attackers had clearly been trained, and were well-informed of their targets. But…

“But we weren’t even involved in this yet,” Beau said. “Why would they try to kill us?”

“I suspect all of my contacts have received… murderous missives tonight,” Essek said, looking down in what might have been shame. “If they attacked you… well, I came to you because I thought you might have been safe.”

“But why?” Jester said again, face somber.

“I do not know,” Essek said with a sigh. He rubbed his eyes slightly, before noticing that they were all watching him. He composed himself in an instant. “It is the one hole in my theory. But I don’t know who else it could have been, so… I must assume, at least for the time being.”

The group all sat for a moment, digesting the information. An incredibly powerful man was after them, intent to kill—and he had already killed Molly. And for what? A few valuable statues that they hadn’t even known about yet?

Something didn’t add up, but Beau’s mind was far too tired to think about it. It felt like the longest day of her entire life, and from the looks on everyone else’s faces, they felt the same way.

They all fell silent for an indeterminable amount of time. Beau wondered if she was going to fall asleep, since she felt exhausted to her bones, but something about the air kept her tense and alert. She leaned back and sighed.

Yasha shifted slightly next to her, and placed her arm against Beau’s. It wasn’t much of a change from their previous positions, but it was nice to have the warmth of another person to hold onto.

After minutes or perhaps hours had passed, Caduceus let them know they were approaching the air field.

“I have a private plane,” Essek said.

“Ooh!” Jester said.

“Where are we going?” Beau said. “You haven’t explained that.”

“My contact who recovered the artifacts was going to meet me near Quttinirpaaq National Park,” Essek said. “He’s skittish, he wanted somewhere fairly private. Hopefully that means he’s still alive.”

“Quttinirpaaq?” Beau said, feeling stupid.

“It is in the north of Canada,” Caleb said, because of course he knew. “Very, very north. We may not be dressed for the weather.”

“I’ve had clothes sent to the plane,” Essek waved his hand. “I do attempt to be a gracious host,” he said with a smile at their incredulity.

The van’s path was smooth through the airport. Beau had never experienced being able to drive directly to the airfield, but whoever Essek knew had opened all kinds of doors for them.

“Wow, if only I knew that all you needed for airports to be tolerable was huge amounts of money,” she said sarcastically.

“You say that like it’s a surprise,” Essek murmured. She bit back a smile.

The plane was small, by plane standards. Still, Beau was quietly impressed by its sleek exterior and, once they entered it, luxurious interior.

“Oh, Essek, please tell me this thing has snacks!” Jester said, bouncing up and down.

“It… does,” Essek said.

Jester shrieked wordlessly with joy and began searching through cabinets immediately. Most of the rest of them just found seats and sat down immediately, feeling incredibly tired. Yasha closed her eyes immediately, although whether to actually sleep was a question only she knew the answer to.

“Caleb, may I borrow you for a moment?” Essek said. Caleb nodded eagerly, and followed him into a second cabin.

Jester looked after them, glancing back at Beau as she rifled through another snack drawer. “I think Essek likes Caleb,” she whispered conspiratorially. She was crouched in the plane’s aisle. They still hadn’t taken off, but Beau wasn’t sure she would move even once they had. Well, she supposed it wasn’t all that dangerous, considering who Jester was. Not that she’d be the one to object even if it was.

“Oh, really?” Beau said, enjoying the feeling of middle school gossip over the rest of the evening’s misery. “How do you know?”

“He only wants to talk to him,” Jester said, counting numbers down on her fingers. “He tells him secret information that I have to _beg_ him for, and all Caleb has to do is ask—and there’s no way Caleb’s more charming than me,” she said, giggling. “And he kept talking to us after we did his last job! No clients _ever_ do that. And I don’t see him pulling aside anyone else.”

Beau couldn’t argue with that logic, not least because she was so tired. “I might need to take a nap, Jess,” she said.

“Aww, okay,” Jester said, but she looked tired herself. She tossed Beau a wrapped-up muffin she’d uncovered, and turned away. Before she went to go take a seat, she paused. “Do you think it’s wrong of us to be joking around and stuff? So quickly, I mean?”

“No,” Beau said, this answer at least coming easily. “I think it’s… I mean, I think it’s just what people do. Or at least, some people.”

“Yeah, I know, we all cope in different ways and all that,” Jester said. “But I just… I’m not happy. But pretending feels better.”

“Me too,” Beau said.

“But you don’t pretend to be happy,” Jester said with a confused look.

“Nah,” Beau said. “But we all have to pretend sometimes, right? Ugh. I don’t know. Go find Caduceus if you want some wisdom.”

Jester grinned. “You’re plenty wise, Beau.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Beau said. “G’night.”

The other woman left, walking back to the empty seat across from Fjord. Beau was left by herself, sitting across from Yasha. Beau watched Yasha’s face for a moment, and then turned to the window. Even as the plane departed, it was too dark to see much, but the faint echoes of clouds catching in the plane’s light were enough to send her off to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> beau: his name is... ludinus... da'leth...?  
> essek: yes.  
> beau: 
> 
> (Anyway fantasy names are hard to deal w/ in modern times but it's better that than calling him like. larry dilbert)
> 
> Thank you to all of you for commenting, and to comfortcharacters for reading not one but THREE drafts of this chapter!


	13. Interlude - Veth/Nott

There was a time when Nott was known not as Nott, but as Veth Smyth. A young girl who was raised being told she was ugly and unimportant, existing only to do the work that no one else wanted to do. Veth didn’t remember a time in her life when she hadn’t been working.

Logically, she knew that she must have at least lived freely when she was very small, and perhaps the memory of that early freedom had been with her once, but it was long gone now. She was the second youngest in the group before Beau, second only to Jester, but she often felt more mature and exhausted than many of them. Even though she knew Caleb was centuries older than her, she felt a protectiveness over him that sometimes extended to the rest of the group. Maybe it was just her memories.

Veth had a habit of blasting the television to annoy Fjord in their New York safehouse, partially because his room was right nearby, and partially because she enjoyed flipping through the channels. She remembered the advent of film technology, and it still fascinated her especially as more and more films and TV shows were created every year.

She would occasionally turn on a Victorian drama to enjoy the inaccuracies, occasionally recruiting Caleb to mock it alongside her. He didn’t remember much of the period before they met, but sometimes a few things would come back if he talked to the others. She thought maybe that was why he asked the rest of them so many questions about their lives, in an attempt to recover his lost time.

Even during Caleb’s delicate interrogations, she hadn’t told him everything. Her real name was still something that only she knew. It was partially her resisting the recollection of certain particularly painful memories, and partially the fact that she wanted one thing that was all her own. Unlike most of the group, Veth had spent most of her life surrounded by other people. She needed things that were entirely for her sometimes.

Veth did not remember the feeling of childhood freedom, but she did remember with a scientist’s accuracy the general facts of her early life, although she felt little emotional attachment to those times. She remembered her parents as dim, smiling figures, but she’d been separated from them at a young age anyway. In Victorian England in 1870, someone as poor as Veth wasn’t going to be able to live with her family for very long. By the time she was ten years old, she was already working for rich families as a scullery maid. She was passed around a few times, fired because her stubby child’s fingers weren’t strong enough yet to scrub effectively. By the time she was thirteen, she was in the permanent employ of the family with whom she spent most of her young adult life. Or at least, permanent as long as they decided it was.

Many families had a name that they called their maids, depending on their status. The common name for the scullery maid was “Mary,” which Veth had always found personally degrading—but so were many things about the job. Constant surveillance, often little food, and the occasional beating were common. Her final family was the worst by far, but the thing that bothered her the most about them was the name.

For of course, instead of calling her “Mary” as a way of depriving her of identity, they had picked a different name. “Nott.”

Not what, she wasn’t sure. She was not many things. Not rich, not pretty, not well-liked. As she got older, although she was aware of how dangerous it was, she would filch the occasional trinket from the family when they weren’t looking. They never really noticed, or at least never truly suspected her. She figured if they were going to rap her across the knuckles any time they lost something, she might as well be responsible for the loss.

It was stupid and silly, and because she had to hide them underneath the floorboards to avoid discovery they didn’t even give her any real pleasure. But it was some form of vengeance against the people who made her daily life miserable just because they could.

She was twenty when she met Yeza. She was sent out to pick up a prescription for the family, through the pouring rain. They could have sent her out earlier, she was sure, but they were punishing her for some perceived fault.

The druggist’s assistant was a young man, hair slicked back and wearing a too-large suit. He had bushy brown hair, and although Veth knew he wasn’t what most might consider attractive, there was something about him that was friendly and made her feel warm. He smiled at her brightly and looked her in the eyes when she talked to him about the order. She was sure she looked simply awful, dripping from head to toe, but he didn’t seem to notice.

Her master’s oldest son had a frequent fever for a few months, so she was sent frequently to the druggist. Almost every time she would visit, the man was there. His smile brightened her day, and she looked forward to his soft voice and stammered compliments. As the family’s son was finally on the mend, she told him that it might be the last time she’d be able to come by for a while.

Yeza said paused, hands stopping as he packaged the order for her from the druggist. He turned to her. “Could I… would you see me outside of the shop?” It wasn’t a very traditional way to initiate courtship, but if there was one thing that incredibly low social standing allowed them, it was a modicum of freedom.

“I’d like to,” she told him. “But I’m not allowed.” The lady of the house had a strict “no followers” policy, claiming that it made for bad service.

“Is there any way you could get around it?” He was blushing furiously now, fingers trembling a little bit. In a way that was entirely inappropriate, she allowed herself to touch one of his hands, brushing over it lightly. They were hidden from the rest of the shop by a tall shelf, and she was relieved for the privacy.

She sighed. “They won’t let me even go out by myself for longer than a half hour. The only way I’m getting out of this job is marriage or death, which are pretty equally likely at the moment.”

Yeza looked at her, eyes full of unspoken emotion. In a sudden, emotional gesture, he seized her hands, pressing them together with his own. “Then… would you marry me?”

To this day, she had no idea why she agreed. It was a crazy thing to do, when they barely knew each other. But Yeza was the only person she could remember who had treated her like another person, and with that proposal he had given her an out to a life she despised.

So, she said yes. Veth Smyth became Veth Brenatto. They had a small wedding, attended by a few friends and acquaintances, in a tiny church. They moved into a miniscule apartment that had only a single room, since they had only Yeza’s small salary between them. But with him he brought chemicals and pieces of metalwork, showing her his little inventions and alchemical creations. She was a fast learner, and years of work had left her fingers dexterous and quick. Before long, she was almost as good with the materials as he was. They were incredibly destitute, but Veth was happier than she’d ever been before. She still did housework to try to help pay their debts, but at least now she had a home to return to.

One day, one of Yeza’s inventions took off. They sold them at the side of various marketplaces to try to make a little extra to buy food with, since they could barely afford the room as it was. His little concoction apparently worked quite well when it came to lessening aches and pains in the head, and soon they had people approaching them to buy the recipe. For the first time in her life, Veth realized that they had money to spare.

Just as things were looking up for them, Veth realized that it wouldn’t be long before their little group of two became three. She was relieved that they finally had enough money to add a room to their residence, since sharing a home with a baby was difficult enough without having an infant in the room with her and Yeza at all times.

When Luc was born, she loved him more than she’d ever loved anything. He looked much like his father, but Yeza said to her often that he hoped Luc had her spirit. It was looking like Veth would have a normal life, the kind she’d craved since childhood. A loving husband, a beautiful son, and enough of an income to get them through the day without hunger pangs.

Luc was about four when it happened. The family had gone out for the day to take a small boat out on a nearby river, since their concoctions were doing well enough that they could afford to take time off now and again. Veth had been a little nervous going out on the water, since the sky was gray and the waters churning a little too much for her taste, but Luc had been so excited that she was reluctant to object. The weather was rarely sunny in their part of the world, anyways.

At first, it was pleasant. They found a still spot and Yeza was trying to do a little fishing—he wasn’t very good at sitting still at the best of times, and Luc continuously splashing the water with his hands was not helping. Veth was enjoying the stiff breeze and Luc’s giggles.

The storm came upon them very suddenly. One second the air was still, and then next it was whipping the water around them into a roaring current and sending them flying down the river. Veth knew there were rapids not far away from where they were that would smash the small boat to smithereens. They had no choice but to get to shore before they hit the worst of the waters.

Try as they might, the boat was now impossible to steer. She could see the rapids churning white water up ahead, looking deceptively shallow, but she knew from what she’d heard and read that their chances of survival would dwindle once they got closer.

Luc was still giggling, unable to understand the impending danger, but Yeza was white-faced and breathing fast. She could tell he was panicking. With a shaking voice, she told Luc everything was going to be fine, running her fingers through his hair as he smiled up at her.

Before she had a chance to think, the boat overturned as they suddenly hit a rock she hadn’t even seen. They were flung into the water, and she clutched Luc for dear life, refusing to allow the river to rip him from her arms. She lost sight of Yeza almost instantly, but she didn’t have the chance to look for him. She needed to trust him and get Luc to shore.

She swam hard, water pulling against her with all its might. She felt like she was gaining only centimeters as the rapids rushed ever-closer, and the water kept closing over her head. She could feel Luc struggling, but she held him as close to her head as she could, trying to keep him above the water enough that he could breathe. Swimming with one arm and a child was nearly impossible, but she felt a surge of adrenaline unlike anything she’d ever experienced.

With a final grunt of effort, she pushed Luc up onto the shore. She saw him roll over onto the ground, hacking up water, but he was safe.

Before she had a chance to pull herself up, a piece of unseen wreckage from further upstream slammed into her, knocking her grip off of dry ground and pulling her back into the river. She saw Luc scream out for her, but couldn’t hear him as the rush of water drowned out all other sound. As she plunged headfirst into the rapids, air sucked from her lungs, she prayed that Yeza had survived so that Luc wouldn’t be left an orphan.

What happened next was miraculous. Somewhere far downstream, some time later, Veth coughed, spewing water out of her lungs, and sat up. The fishermen around her jumped back, faces pale. She was in a boat on the riverbank.

“Luc!” she called out, shakily getting to her feet. Considering the way she remembered her body smashing against the rocks, she was surprised she could still stand.

The men were still standing around her, faces pale and mouths gaping.

“What?” she said.

“We dragged you out of the bottom of the river,” one said breathlessly. “You been dead for half an hour, maybe more…”

Veth stared at them, not comprehending the words. Nobody lived after being dead for that long.

“…What _are_ you?” another man said, fear and awe mixing. She took a step forward, and they all stumbled back. There was a sick feeling growing in her stomach. She hated the way that they looked at her, like she wasn’t even human. She looked down at her hands, skin still paler than usual and clammy with the cold water.

Without pausing, she jumped over the side of the boat and started running as soon as she hit the ground. She heard shouts from the men behind her, but she didn’t want to know what was going to happen if she stuck around.

Veth spent the night hunkered down on the street, the cold biting at her skin under damp clothes. She barely slept, staring at her limbs and turning them over, looking for a bruise or a broken bone. In a moment of horror, she found a piece of broken cobblestone with a sharp corner. She pressed her finger onto the point, watching a bubble of blood well up.

Before her eyes, the tiny pinprick closed, blood disappearing as if it were sucked back into the open wound. Within seconds, there was no evidence that anything had happened. She opened a slightly larger cut on her palm, and this time it was even more evident as the wound sealed up almost as quickly as it was created.

The next day, feeling like a stranger in her own skin, she plodded towards home. She was hours away from their small apartment, but she barely noticed anything as she just walked single-mindedly towards her destination.

When she got close, she suddenly felt deeply uncomfortable. She glanced around corners, avoiding anyone who might recognize her.

As she neared her home, she heard a familiar voice and hid herself in the shadows. Around a corner emerged Yeza, and she felt her heart fill with love to see him alive and well. He was holding Luc’s hand, both wearing dull black clothing. Luc looked confused, picking at his clothes, but Yeza looked deeply sad. She wanted nothing more than to step out and wave to them, wiping the creases away from Yeza’s eyes.

Then she remembered the looks of horror on the fishermen’s faces, and pictured Yeza’s face contorting the same way. Luc pushing her away in terror. Her family running from her when they inevitably discovered her monstrous nature.

In that moment, a horrible feeling of fear and discomfort enveloped Veth. She pulled back further into the shadows, watching Yeza and Luc pass her by. They were only feet away, but rather than running for a reunion she prayed that they wouldn’t spot her.

And so, she allowed Veth Brenatto to die. She decided to use the moniker that the family had used, because somehow now it felt fitting. She was not a good mother, not a good wife, not brave enough to face her family knowing they’d see what she’d become.

Nott allowed herself to indulge in the habits she’d picked up in her youth. Stealing trinkets and hiding in the background. She dressed mostly in black, leaving people to believe she was in mourning—which, she supposed in a way she was. She hid from the world, terrified of the moment they’d all see what even layers of cloth couldn’t hide. That somehow, there was something deeply wrong with her.

Of course, her thieving wasn’t always successful. Every once in a while she’d end up in jail for some time, but this time was different. She hadn’t realized how powerful the man she’d pickpocketed from was until she heard the sentence. She knew by now that she wouldn’t age no matter how long she was in prison, but the thought of being locked away for years for only a few coins was terrifying. She hated the dark, damp prison walls with the biting rats, as much as she felt that it was the only place that she belonged.

Still, there was nothing she could do. She was tossed into a solitary cell, but there was a tiny gap between the stones into the next cell. As she dug into them one day, hoping for some escape method, she heard a voice call muttering on the other side.

“…Hello?” she said hesitantly, voice sounding particularly scratchy after so little food and water.

The man’s voice stopped murmuring, but she heard footsteps. Before she could jump back, there was a blue eye peering through the gap in the stone.

“…Hallo,” the accented voice said back. It sounded German to her, although she’d never left England.

“Do you speak English?” she said. He laughed, a raspy thing.

“Ja, and several other languages,” he said, as if letting her in on a private joke.

“What’s your name?” she asked. If the only thing she was going to be able to do for the next few years was talk to this foreigner, she might as well make overtures of friendliness.

The man paused for a long time, and she thought she’d scared him off. But he finally answered. “…Caleb. Caleb Widogast.”

“Nice to meet you, Caleb,” Nott said. “I’m Nott.”

“Why are you here…?” Caleb asked.

“Oh, you know,” Nott said. “Thieving. Misdemeanors. The usual.”

He chuckled. “Then, Miss Nott, you might be the very person I need.”

Caleb, through some mysterious method of his own, managed to get her the very materials she needed to pick the lock on the door. These were shoved through the tiny slot between the cells, passing bits of wire and conversation back and forth to each other. It was a difficult task that took weeks, wriggling her arm through the slot they provided for food to reach the lock on the exterior in the brief breaks between guards. Someone with a larger stature could never have done it.

When she finally managed it, she walked free into the hallway. There were only moments before the guards returned, and she realized the trust Caleb had placed in her. He had given her everything he had, and she could very easily leave him behind.

She quickly knelt next to his cell, fiddling with the lock. It clicked open in a minute, much easier to do while she could see it. The door opened, and she saw Caleb for the first time. He was tall and incredibly gaunt, eyes haunted and clothes filthy. She had no idea how long he’d been in there, but it looked like years.

“Come on!” she said with urgency. He blinked at the lights, and smiled down at her.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Thank me once we’re actually out,” she said, but she smiled back. It was the first spark of life she’d felt in years.

The two of them were inseparable after that. They helped each other steal what they needed—Nott took her pick of trinkets and jewels, while Caleb always wanted _books,_ of all things.

One day, they were on the run from the police and they were caught. Rather than escorting them to jail, the officer set upon them with a club. He bludgeoned Caleb around the head and he collapsed in an instant. Nott was sure she’d lost him. But as the officer finally left and she crawled towards his body, blood covering his skull, she saw the bruises on his face and hairline vanishing before her eyes.

When he finally awoke and looked at her expression, he sat up. “Nott, I—I can explain,” he started. She shook her head, eyes filled with tears not for the reason he expected.

“I’m the same,” she said. “I thought… I thought I was a monster.”

He smiled at her gently. “You could never be a monster, Nott.”

She didn’t know why they had never dreamed of each other the way the others had. Maybe fate had simply had other ways of bringing them together. A family to replace the ones they had both lost. He didn’t talk much about his past for years, but she could tell he had endured something truly terrible, especially when his eyes would catch on a glowing flame and stare as if he was seeing something that wasn’t there.

After the realization that she was not alone in the world, Nott would sometimes return to Yeza, leaving Caleb to fend for himself for a few days—although she always worried. She never let him see her, of course. He had moved on with his own life, building his shop into an establishment and sending Luc to good schools. She helped, of course, sending him money anonymously that she hoped he was using.

He seemed happy, and there was still a part of her that couldn’t bear to return to her previous life. She couldn’t watch Yeza and Luc grow old while she stayed young. Perhaps it was selfish and cowardly, but she would ensure that they had a good life from the shadows.

There was still a pang in her chest whenever she saw them, especially when she saw Luc grow into a young man and then an adult. She wondered if he would even recognize her if he saw her again now.

She only talked to Yeza again once in her life, after they’d joined the rest of the Mighty Nein. His hair was stark white, and the lines on his face were deep. She’d been watching for days as his every breath shook his weak frame, and suddenly she was overcome with the need to see him—really see him.

She let herself into the house through a back window. Luc had been there with his new family, caring for his father, but he was sleeping briefly now in another room. She moved completely stealthily, and she knew there was no chance she would wake him.

When she stepped into the room, Yeza’s eyes snapped to her with surprising awareness. “Who’s there?” he called out faintly.

She stepped into the fading light from the window, and she saw his expression change to one of pure bliss.

“Have you come to see me off, my love?” he said weakly.

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” she breathed, sitting down so she could clutch his hand. In spite of his age, there was the same strength there that she had felt when he had grabbed her hands and asked for her hand.

“Were you watching, from above?” he asked.

“Always,” she said.

“Did we make you proud?” he asked, a tear sliding from the corner of his eye.

“Every day,” she murmured.

She leaned over to kiss him one last time, and then slipped from the room as his eyes closed and he went back to sleep, energy drained. She didn’t know if he would remember the encounter, but she hoped he would. She was watching from nearby when he passed several hours later, watching Luc hold his hands the same way she had.

She and Caleb had started their relationship with the rest of the Nein on a little more rocky terms than most. It had taken them years to build up trust with each other, and the introduction of many more people to their family was a difficult challenge at first. But they had plenty of time, and over the years she grew close to many of the new people in their group.

She saw Caleb opening up too, when he let Yasha cut his hair with her _sword_ or when Jester leaned over his shoulder to see what he was reading. His eyes seemed less tired, and he smiled more. It was what he needed, and it ended up feeling like she needed it too.

Nott was able to open up to them—never fully, but more than with anyone except Caleb. They understood having prickly parts of your past that you never really wanted to talk about, like the letters with money that she still would send off to Luc, to his children, to his grandchildren. She hadn’t been a mother to him, really, but she would ensure he had a good life in the only way she knew how.

When he finally died, she whispered the truth to Caleb in the dead of night and slept curled against his shoulder. She showed him the one thing she had of them, snatched from storage after Yeza’s death. Luc probably didn’t even remember that it existed. It was a photograph of the three of them, shortly after Luc’s birth when he was still a bundle wrapped in white cloth. She looked at it some nights, feeling torn between the life she could have had and the reality of her existence. There was no easy answer. Veth Brenatto and Nott the Brave couldn’t coexist, not really. But some days with the Mighty Nein, she felt closer to her real self, perhaps a mix of her two identities, than she ever had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whooops forgot to write an end note at first!! it's been that kind of day. Which also is probably why this chapter made me sad : ' )
> 
> Thanks to everyone for commenting and to comfortcharacters for correcting my commas!!


	14. Chapter 14

Beau felt like she had slept for a hundred years after the day they’d had, her muscles stiff from the physical ordeal. Yasha had been awake, staring out the window, when Beau had opened her eyes. She wondered how long the other woman had been awake, if she’d even slept at all. Yasha looked more calm than the previous night, though, staring out the window.

“It’s snowing,” Yasha said quietly to her. The hum of the plane gave them a degree of privacy, if any of the others were awake already.

Beau looked out the window and saw that Yasha was right. There were mountains far below, and in and out of the cloud covering she could see snow falling. The window was half-frozen at their altitude. Yasha’s eyes were locked on the outside air.

“Did it snow a lot in your home?” she asked.

“Yes,” Yasha said. “Snow reminds me of home, sometimes. If I am thinking about it already.”

“And you were… thinking about home?” Beau asked. A part of her felt like she shouldn’t prod, but she wanted to know something more about Yasha. She still felt like she knew so little about all of them.

“I was thinking about Zuala,” Yasha said. “She was the first person I ever loved.”

Beau felt a pang in her heart at the pain on Yasha’s face. From the way Yasha’s face had turned stone-cold, she knew that things had not ended well. She could imagine, no matter how things had gone, that there was a time limit on any relationship with an immortal being.

“I’m sorry,” Beau said.

“Do not be sorry,” Yasha said. “I was glad to love her.”

Beau nodded, unsure of how to respond.

“I don’t mean to make things… weird,” Yasha said. “It just feels strange to be around someone who does not know everything about me. It has been a long time since I met a new person.” She smiled to herself slightly, eyes flickering down from Beau’s as she looked down at her hands.

Beau snorted, then looked down at her hands as well. “Yeah, I get that. I’ve never really been around anyone who knew me, so… opposite problem, I guess.”

Yasha looked at her, and Beau felt her eyes drawn back up to Yasha’s face as if there were a magnetism between them. “I want to know you,” Yasha said quietly.

“Oh,” Beau said, feeling as if the wind had been knocked out of her. “I… want to know you too.”

Before they could continue speaking, Essek strode down the aisle. He still looked fairly run-down, but the bags under his eyes were slightly lessened. “We’ll be arriving shortly,” he announced. “We can take transport from the airport once we touch down to get to my contact.”

“Do you think we are going to meet much resistance?” Caleb asked. The rest of the Mighty Nein who had still been sleeping were beginning to rouse themselves, and Caduceus was somehow already making coffee for everyone.

Essek sighed. “I doubt it, but it is difficult to say. It depends on how many steps ahead of me Ludinus is.”

“And how many do you _think?”_ Beau asked.

Essek gave her a cold look. “It is difficult to be more than a few moves ahead of me,” he said with a tiny glint of a smile. She didn’t like it.

“I think we should be prepared for the worst,” Fjord said.

“Don’t worry, Essek,” Jester said. “If there are any bad guys around, we’ll just kick their asses. We won’t let anyone get to you.”

Essek’s face softened just slightly into an expression Beau couldn’t recognize before he stiffened back into his usual calm mask. “Thank you, Jester, but I sincerely doubt your efforts will be required.”

“Let us hope you are right,” Caleb said, but he and Essek shared a smile.

The plane touched down not too long after, descending from the gray cloud cover to see the snow-covered mountains and a glassy, half-frozen lake somewhere in the distance. It was nearing midday, and the sun was shining white and cold.

Essek passed out winter coverings for all of them, which Beau put on over her shirt with some reluctance. Still, as much as she liked to have her arms free, they’d be no good to her frozen. She saw Essek wrap a scarf around Caleb’s neck as the other man leaned forward, a moment of surprising vulnerability from Caleb. She had barely seen him physically interact with any of the others except Nott, so it was a surprise to see him so comfortable with another person.

“There is a small facility where we can wait for the car,” Essek said. “The temperatures are quite low today, so we had best not wait out here.”

As they exited the plane, he pointed to a small building on the airfield. There were a few other planes around the area, but none taking off or landing. It looked like a relatively small airport, and Beau realized she’d probably never been so far from home in her life. She didn’t even have a passport, but apparently that didn’t matter if your host was rich enough.

“Right this way,” Essek said, walking brusquely forward. Beau caught a glimpse of his face as he brushed past her, and he looked deeply tired. She wondered if the attack from the previous night was still plaguing his conscience that much.

As the cold air seemed to whip straight through their clothes, the Mighty Nein rushed into the building. Jester jumped up and down to try to get some warmth back into her as soon as they got inside, while the rest of them hugged themselves or rubbed their hands together.

It was a small building, the area they were in looking like an empty storeroom in a larger warehouse. There was nothing inside except some scaffolding, a few high-up windows, and a few sections with roped-off crates.

Essek frowned. “My man was supposed to meet me here,” he said. “Let me step outside to make a call. I will only be a moment.”

“Thank you, Essek,” Caleb said. Essek’s face tightened for just a second, and he slipped outside.

Beau stared after him, eyes narrowed. Why couldn’t he just make the call inside? The temperature felt dangerously cold. And why was his behavior so strange? The rest of them didn’t seem to notice—and perhaps they just expected this kind of behavior from him. Or maybe, Beau thought with growing tension, they trusted him too much to notice.

The rest of the group still milling around inside, trying to warm up, Beau walked to the back of the group, and before anyone could ask where she was going, she stepped outside. She was going to have a one-on-one conversation with him, and get some answers one way or another.

She looked around, but there was no sign of him. Even more strange. He had barely stepped outside, and he was suddenly gone? The wind was whipping up into another snowfall, so her visibility was slightly impaired, but even so she could tell he wasn’t close.

She walked around the side of the building, and then with a gasp flattened herself around the corner. Essek was there, talking to a man she didn’t recognize. She peered around the corner again, careful to keep the bare minimum of her face in view, but the snow was picking up enough that she was fairly sure it would be difficult to see her.

Beau couldn’t hear their conversation over the roar of the wind, but she got a look at the other man. He had pale skin, wrapped in a black cloak, and long white hair pulled back into a low ponytail. He had the kind of face that would belong to someone who was much older than they first appeared. She couldn’t see Essek’s face, but he was gesturing to the other man, who was frowning.

Before she had a chance to try to get closer, she saw a few things she hadn’t noticed at first. The first was the other group of figures, all dressed in dark colors, gathered near the far end of the building. The second was the pale smoke drifting out of an open window that she knew belonged to the room she’d just been inside.

“Fuck,” Beau hissed. She turned back the way she’d come, ready to run into combat, but there was another group of people near the door. They were only a few paces away from her, and the only reason she hadn’t been seen already was the growing snowstorm. They were holding a bar in place that was keeping the door that she’d just exited shut, and when she listened closely she could hear banging from inside over the roar of the wind.

Every part of her wanted to jump into action. Maybe with the element of surprise, she could take them down, but she could see between the two groups that there were already two or three dozen men. With the entire Mighty Nein, they’d have no problem, but with only Beau… she wasn’t sure. Her chances were low, at best.

But they hadn’t seen her yet, and that was her only advantage. With a sinking feeling in her chest, she realized that she had no choice but to wait. It was the only way to possibly have a win—lose now, and try again later. Either way, Beau was on her own.

She crept away from the building, hiding behind one of the wheels of the plane still on the runway not far away. She could barely see through the storm, but it was enough to make out the situation. After a few moments of holding the door closed, the figures opened it. One or two people collapsed out from the inside as if they’d been pressed against the door, and her heart pounded with fear and fury.

Beau could see them handcuffing the seemingly unconscious—she hoped—Mighty Nein, much more effectively than Lorenzo’s crew had done. Had those attackers simply been the first wave? Lorenzo had been cruel, but these people were just cruelly efficient.

It didn’t take them long to pack the Mighty Nein into a heavily armored truck. Beau briefly considered trying to sneak underneath it, but she had no idea how far it was going to go, and she just wasn’t sure she could get close enough unseen. She cursed this plan, and wished again that she could just run in. But all they would need was a few bullets and she’d be out of commission for long enough for them to capture her, too, and leave the group defenseless and alone.

A spark of an idea grew in her mind when she saw Essek waving the trucks off, the man he’d been talking to getting inside one. If he wasn’t going with them, she’d have someone to interrogate. And, thinking of the way he’d been so friendly with the Mighty Nein as she cracked her knuckles, this was an interrogation she was going to enjoy.

As the trucks roared into the distance, snow concealing them from view, she watched them go with a feeling of deep pain. She felt like she was making a terrible mistake, fearful that she’d never see them again, but she also knew she had no choice. And besides, there was no one on earth who could hide from Beau when she had as long as she needed to find them.

This in mind, she followed Essek as he walked back inside another door of the building, into a separate area. She waited a few moments, then cracked open the door and peered inside. He was nowhere to be seen.

More cautious than she’d ever been in her life, she slipped inside. It was a dark hallway, small office-looking rooms lining the sides, and she heard footsteps from further in. There were some pieces of construction equipment lying around, metal poles and wooden crates, that obscured the far reaches of the hall. She crept after the sound, slipping off her shoes and holding them under her arm to be as quiet as possible.

The footsteps made a turn, and when she got to the end of the hallway she saw one room left on the left-hand side. She shoved her shoes back on and grabbed a sturdy-looking wooden pole leaning against the wall, feeling its weight settle comfortably in her hands.

With a swift motion, she jumped into the room, newly-acquired staff at the ready.

Essek was sitting on the edge of the desk, head in his hands. He jerked upwards at the sound she made when she jumped inside, but when he saw who it was he just sighed. Within a moment, she had her pole pressed against his neck as she shoved him up against the back wall.

“Where are they?” she hissed. “Where are they taking them?”

Essek choked, staff blocking his windpipe. She lessened the pressure ever-so-slightly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what they were planning.”

“Cool,” she said bitterly. “That’s not an answer.”

“I thought it could be a good thing for—hrkkk,” he said, words blocked off as she shoved the pole even further against his throat.

“No more talking unless it’s an answer,” she said, blood pulsing through her veins feeling white-hot with fury.

He pressed against the staff weakly, and after a moment of consideration, heart thundering in her ears, she released him, leaving him wheezing as he cowered against the wall.

“Explain,” she said. “Quickly. Every second they get further away.”

“It’s Ludinus Da’leth,” he gasped out, massaging his throat.

“This isn’t about artifacts,” she spat. “What’s going on?!”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “That’s just how I came into contact with him. He… he knows about you. He wants to find out what makes you all… the way you are. So maybe they can replicate it.” Essek straightened up slightly, but he still kept his back against the wall, eyeing her staff.

“How did he find out?” she hissed. “Stop acting like you’re not responsible for this. You led us into a trap!”

“I _know_ I’m responsible for this,” Essek said faintly. “I am the reason he found out. I had my suspicions, but… I had my spy watching you at Senator Prucine’s house. There was no other way to explain how you walked out of there alive.”

“So you sold them out,” Beau said. “They _trusted_ you!”

“It was just supposed to be research!” he protested. “I thought… the knowledge could better the world. If they would just allow themselves to be studied…”

Beau gave him a disgusted look. “Molly is dead.”

Essek brought a hand up to his face, fingers trembling slightly. “That should never have happened. I was told they would use nonlethal force. I… I didn’t know…” Cautiously, he took a few steps to the side, pointing at a board at the side of the room that she hadn’t noticed previously. It was covered in pictures and post-its, letters, and string. “Please, look at this,” he said.

She walked a few steps closer, and as she did she saw the faces of the Mighty Nein staring back at her. There was a photo of Jester carrying a man on her back out of a trench, of Caduceus delivering medicine to sick patients, of Fjord at the helm of a ship rescuing people from sinking wreckage. All of them were there—saving people, helping people.

“They’ve done so much good in the world,” Essek said. “The people they’ve saved—they’ve created so much positive change. It’s like fate places them where they need to be, at exactly the right time. I just wanted—I thought that this could help the world even more.” He paused. “And if… if any of them wanted it, we might even be able to figure out how to end it for them.”

Beau sighed, pinching the skin of her forehead. “They might have helped you if you had just asked,” she growled. “But this is wrong.”

“I know,” Essek said. He sighed, running his fingers anxiously over a small ring on his thumb. Its golden hue and red-orange stone didn’t match the rest of his apparel, as if it were a gift from someone else. He looked at her, eyes tired and guilty. “I only hope someday they can forgive me.”

Beau whipped her staff around, pointing one end of it at Essek’s throat. He leaned backwards away from it. “It’s time for you to tell me where they are.”

He cleared his throat, somehow managing to look composed even with a weapon pointed directly at him. “I’ll do you one better,” he said. “I’ll take you there myself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> last plot chapter before the finale & epilogue!!! next time, we'll have our last interlude.
> 
> Thank you to everyone for commenting, and to comfortcharacters for screaming at Essek with me!!


	15. Interlude - Caleb

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey just a quick note to check the updated tags! this chapter's a bit of a heavy one.

Caleb felt that in many ways he had lived two lives. There was his time as Bren, and then his time as Caleb. The time when he had been a moral person who could be seen and forgiven, and the time when he was no longer that version of himself. There was a time he could remember minute detail by minute detail, and a time he could remember little, if anything.

He had always had a near-perfect memory, and whether that was a good or bad thing was difficult to say. Unlike many of the others who were as old as him or older, like Yasha and Caduceus, he could remember the year of his birth—1380, the small walled city he’d grown up in—Rothenburg, the faces of his parents—Leofric and Una. It was all crystal clear. Sometimes when he wished he could forget, would do anything to do so, he hated the way it was burned into his mind. Even Nott’s whiskey could do little to wipe it all away. In fact, sometimes being drunk just brought back the worst parts of it all, the parts he could consciously choose to ignore if he was aware of himself.

Caleb knew logically, by now, that he could probably share at least parts of his history with the Mighty Nein and they would stand by him. But a part of him still expected their faces to morph into disgust and hatred when they realized who he really was.

Sometimes the thought kept him awake at night, staring at the ceiling and wondering why he, in particular, had been chosen for an immortal life. It was this more than anything else that dissuaded him from the belief that some of the others had, that fate had somehow chosen them and brought them together. If anyone or anything had chosen them on purpose, he could hardly believe they could have seen his life and given him this gift in spite of it.

The only person who knew even parts of his story was Nott, and even she didn’t know everything. She knew a few scattered facts. His name had been Bren Aldric Ermendrud. He had trained under a man named Trent Ikithon, with his friends Eadwulf and Astrid. He had killed his parents. Nott was convinced it couldn’t have really been his fault, saying he always blamed himself too much for everything—but she didn’t know the full story.

Bren was born poor, and being extremely poor in the fourteenth century was a consignment to a life of misery and an early death by illness or overwork. His parents loved him, and he still remembered so many wonderful things about them. His mother would curl up with him in bed when he was haunted by nightmares as a small child. His father would give Bren extra food off of his plate when they barely had enough to feed themselves.

One of the few escapes from poverty that he could hope for was to join the priesthood, and so Bren aspired to that. He was taught to read and write, a skill that was at times hard to come by, and he would consume every piece of writing that came his way. When the others would make fun of him in jest about his voracious love of books, he would remember the time when they had been much harder to come by.

He was a good student for the Church because he read scripture day and night. They weren’t to know it wasn’t for a particular passion for religion, but rather for the written word.

Bren had been pulled away from studying by his parents when Trent Ikithon had visited their small city. Ikithon was a powerful noble and a prince-elector, part of the council that elected the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. Many parents came that day, presenting their children. Bren had been fifteen.

As a prince-elector not directly involved in the church, Trent Ikithon had a unique ability. He had no children, which was well-known, so he could select his successor—the Kurprinz _,_ the electoral prince. It was rumored he was scouting for possibilities among the poorer families. At the time people believed that it was because he wanted to give even the lowest classes the chance to be a part of their empire, but now Caleb wondered if it was just because he wanted someone with as little power as possible to stand against him. Someone he could control completely.

He remembered the first time he’d seen the man. He had long white hair and wore a clever smile. He hadn’t known how afraid of that smile to be, then. Ikithon had liked his intelligence and wit, and Bren had been ready and eager to please. Caleb remembered with a wave of nausea how pleased he had been to have someone recognize his skills.

In the end, Trent selected three children from their city to accompany with him. Bren, Eadwulf, and Astrid. Only Bren or Eadwulf had any chance of succeeding him, but Astrid had so impressed him with her eagerness to learn that he had taken her on as his assistant. Or perhaps it had been because he saw that she was like him, in so many ways.

Bren’s parents had been ecstatic, even though it meant that he had to leave them. They had packed all of his meager belongings, promising him that although the separation was painful he had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rise above his station for a better life.

His parents had wrapped him in a tight hug before sending him off to live at the vast Ikithon estate. They had promised that he could always come home, and that they would love him always. He wondered if that really would have been true, if they had known then who would condemned them to their fate.

Trent had promised the three children diplomatic training, and an education the likes of which they could never hope to receive elsewhere. It certainly was an education unlike any other. Within the first few weeks they were there, Trent revealed the truth of why he had selected the three of them rather than just one.

Not only did he intend to groom one of them for his position, but he would train all three of them as protectors of nobility, and whoever was not chosen would forever stand by the side of the prince-elector. They would end up one noble and two bodyguards, assassins, agents—whatever was needed.

For this to work, they needed extensive training, both physical and mental, beyond the education that they would receive. This meant they worked day and night—during the day studying history, diplomacy, and the intricacies of the world of power, and during the night, learning espionage, combat, and torture.

None of the three of them were prepared for this kind of an education. Caleb wondered now what would have happened if he had walked away as he often wanted to. Trent probably would have had him killed, of course, but maybe that would have been for the best.

Caleb still had the scars from what Trent had done to them, in more ways than one. They were beaten brutally when they failed to comply, when they complied but not fast enough, or even when there was nothing discernibly wrong with their performance. He told them he was building them into something great, and they had believed him. As the three of them lay in bed, aching and bleeding and terrified of the man who was supposed to protect them, they had talked excitedly about what their futures would bring. It had changed his friends, of course. Eadwulf became very quiet, while Astrid became ice-cold. Caleb was sure he had changed, too, but as good as his memory was he didn’t really remember what he himself had been like before Trent. That part of him was so long-dead, it felt pointless to try to resuscitate the memory.

He remembered when Trent had put the first man in front of him, shaking in his chair where he was tied, and handed him the knife. He was told that the man was a traitor. That he should be glad to do what needed to be done for their great empire. Bren’s hands had trembled when he had made the first incision, and Trent had punished him severely for his hesitation.

Caleb knew now what had happened to them could barely be called training. Trent had purposefully broken each of them down to build them back up again, physically torturing them and mentally isolating them so they would become completely his. But knowing that didn’t help on the nights when he remembered the eagerness with which he had embraced his role, desperate for the approval of a man who cared only about preserving his own legacy. He had hurt so many people, people who did not deserve what he had done to them. And he had been _glad_ to do it.

Sometimes when the Nein would be interrogating someone for a job, Caleb would be tempted to use what he had learned. He knew he could get answers out of people, had learned back in the times when no tactic was too underhanded. But then he pictured their faces, and the way Nott would recoil, and Jester’s smile would fall. He never suggested that he take over.

Over time, the three of them came to realize that Bren was the most likely successor for Trent’s position. Bren was a good study, intelligent, and would do whatever Ikithon asked. He wasn’t the most ruthless, but Astrid had never had a real chance anyway. He knew she stewed in the resentment sometimes, but he envied her that she was rarely the center of Trent’s attention. Having their master’s attention was never good for long.

So when Bren was told that he would be chosen to be electoral prince, he wasn’t surprised, but he was incredibly happy. He pictured the elation on his parents’ faces, and when their master informed them they would be traveling back to Rothenburg, he couldn’t wait to relay the news.

Trent told them he would be going first to meet with Bren’s family. They had only a storeroom as a spare room, so his parents gave up their room to his master. It was the first time he had seen them in two years, but their embrace was as familiar and comfortable as it had ever been. They were so excited for where the future was taking him, and as he sat with them and talked he felt his sins wash away. He knew they wondered at his gaunt frame and new scars, but they knew better than to ask.

That night, Trent had called Bren into his parents’ room. He’d told him that he’d uncovered papers hidden in the floorboard. The papers were written shakily, almost illegibly, in a near-perfect replica of his father’s hand. Caleb wondered now how long Trent had been preparing this deception. Had it been that important to him that his students were truly his, with no one else to turn to? Or had he truly believed, somewhere deep within his twisted mind, that it was necessary for their growth?

Well into the night, Ikithon had talked to him, showing him each page and each proof of his parents’ crimes. Heresy and treason, lie upon lie. They had sent Bren away because they didn’t want him to find out about what they had done. But in doing so, he had learned loyalty to his nation that they never could. His parents were evil, and it was his role in life to do away with such evils.

Bren had felt like his heart was breaking, but before Trent’s cool gaze he knew what he had to do. There had never been another option. He cursed himself now, wondering why he never even thought to consider that it could have been a lie. But even if he had known, Caleb wondered if that would have been enough for him to stand against Trent.

Bren took the evidence and presented it to the proper authorities, face stone-cold. At first they were suspicious of him, believing he might have inherited his parents’ heretical pursuits, but Trent spoke for him. He had been grateful for that _kindness_ , at the time.

There had been a trial, but with the veritable mountain of evidence and Trent’s word against them, they might as well have condemned them on the spot.

Trent insisted that Bren go to the execution. His parents were to be burned at the stake as heretics, and he was to watch. His master had squeezed his shoulder, told him that it would be painful but it was necessary to endure the pain to be made strong. Eadwulf and Astrid were there. He would only find out later that Trent had found “evidence” on their families, too, and they had listened to him just as Bren had.

While he watched the pyres being built, Bren still believed that something would change. They would realize that there must have been a mistake. Even as he watched, safe in the anonymity of the crowd from the pleading eyes of the people who had raised and loved him, he was sure that this could not happen.

His faith left him when the flames began licking at their feet. When the screaming started, something inside of Bren broke. The flames became all he could see, and he had collapsed there on the street. He still remembered how even as his mind had begun to crumble, he had felt a pang of shame at the disappointed expression on Trent’s face.

Bren had broken, but not yet completely shattered. In the next few weeks and months, which faded into tired years, he lived on in the monastery that Trent had sent him to. He imagined Trent was too ashamed to even look at him, this pathetic boy who had endured so much but could not pass his final test. He spent some days wishing that he could have fulfilled his duty, taken on Trent’s position. He spent other days screaming, remembering the smell of his parents’ burning flesh.

Astrid and Eadwulf did not visit. He wondered if Eadwulf would take his place, now, or if Trent had ever truly intended to give up his position at all. There were so many secrets and lies that he did not understand. Bren knew he was a man left alone by the world for penance, who could only hope for the blessing of being ignored by humanity and forgotten by history.

When he was left unattended after many quiet years, Bren took the opportunity when he saw it. He walked slowly to the top of the monastery’s tower, and without pausing, he stepped off of the highest ledge. It was simply the only thing he could think of left to do. He had wondered occasionally if he might see his parents again, but he knew that that would be too great a gift for someone as unforgivable as him.

When Bren awoke, body slowly piecing itself back together, he realized he was cursed. God would not allow him to die after such great sins. He would not be permitted the escape of death, while he still had so much to atone for. When Bren looked out at the great expanse of his life and saw nothing but his own guilt and shame looking back at him for eternity, it was then that he truly lost himself.

He knew some of the others were grateful for their gift, in spite of the pain it had brought them. Some of them had lived much more valuable lives after it than before. He knew he was not the only one among the Nein who had lost someone important. But he knew none of them were as monstrous as he was. Nott tried to persuade him that what had happened was because of Trent, but what she didn’t understand was that he knew that. Caleb was under no illusions that without Trent’s influence, he ever would have caused harm to his parents.

Nott just didn’t see that any person who could do what he had done, even under someone’s influence, even as young as he was, was irredeemable. There was no coming back from something like that, no matter how much time passed. She didn’t see how it was his responsibility to bear his crimes on his back forever.

After Bren shattered, years passed. Centuries. Caleb looked back at the huge, empty expanse of his life, and hated the blankness that came with it. He rabidly consumed historical tomes, looking for some trace of his presence or some piece of his life that it might uncover. Nothing ever came beyond scattered thoughts and disjointed memories. He supposed that was the price he had to pay for his mistakes. A life empty of human contact and meaning for an empty man.

In some ways, although Caleb was older than many of the Mighty Nein, this vacant part of his mind made him not feel his age the way some of them did. He knew Yasha felt her age, and Caduceus even more so. But sometimes Caleb still felt that he was a young man, still as foolish and naïve as he had been at fifteen.

In his reading, he found Trent again, and Astrid, and Eadwulf. History held much hatred for what the three of them had done. His own name was nowhere to be found, and he didn’t know if he should be grateful or guilty. He looked at the way they condemned Astrid in the same sentence as her master, and remembered dancing with her, and the joy in her eyes at fifteen when she’d been chosen alongside him. He remembered the way that Eadwulf had never known quite what to say, and in the end had begun to look to Trent for his next words.

Caleb hated people who damaged books, but he blotted his friends’ names out of the text. It was the only thing he could do for them.

He knew he would never have survived if it wasn’t for his endless curse. In what little fragments he did remember, he had lived gutter to gutter, asylum to asylum, prison cell to prison cell. He didn’t remember where he had been when Trent died, or Eadwulf, or Astrid. By the time he came back to himself, they were gone like they had never even existed.

A scratchy voice one cell over was the first thing he could remember, after decades upon decades of empty space. A woman who needed his help, and who helped him in return. When she asked him his name, he almost told her. But he realized he had the chance to kill Bren Aldric Ermendrud with his own hands, and he took it. And so, Caleb Widogast was born.

He sensed something special about her, and in that sense was tempted to run as far from her as his feet could take him. He had learned his lesson about what fate had in store for him.

But, for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to leave her, even once he found out that she was cursed with the same life as he was. There was a sense of deep regret, cowardice, and pain in her that was the same as the part of him that he hated, but in her he could forgive it. With Nott he could see that she made the only decisions she could, and whether they were right or wrong was irrelevant.

With Nott, he met the rest of the Mighty Nein. He knew that if it had not been for her, he would have run from them within the first week. For a man who had spent centuries in his own mental prisons, they were too loud, too happy, too colorful. There was pain there too, but they seemed at peace with it. Even after half a millennia, he still screamed himself awake most nights.

But Nott wanted them to stay, although she never really talked about why. He wondered if they were anything like the family that occupied her thoughts, or if she was staying for his sake as he was staying for hers. In the end, it didn’t matter. The Nein wormed their way into his heart as much as he tried not to let them.

And the fires of his dreams gained new screaming faces, as his friends pleaded with him not to kill them. To set them free before the fire consumed them. But he didn’t.

They did good in the world sometimes, when they weren’t working only for money. Nott asked him if that helped his dreams, but he didn’t know how to tell her that it would take more good than he could achieve in even his eternal lifetime to make up for what he had done.

However, even he could admit, the more time he spent with the Nein, the less frequent his dreams became. He felt guilty when the shame left him for days at a time, since he knew he did not deserve to be happy. But sometimes, he could not help it. 

When they’d done a job for a mysterious man named Essek, he had been intrigued by his power and knowledge. He could sense the man’s interest in him, and when they talked he could tell they shared many passions. Caleb felt an attraction he had not felt in centuries, since he was a young man and his eyes were locked on another equally dangerous friend and ally. Since he had waltzed with Astrid.

It was wonderful to talk to someone whose passion for knowledge consumed him the way that it did Caleb. But he could not trust Essek, and when he saw the dangerous glint in the other man’s eyes he knew he was right. He wondered if the look in Essek’s eyes would lead him to the same place in the history books that Astrid now belonged in. But still, he could not help himself when they met. He wanted to speak with him, to learn more and to share what he had learned. It was a foolish pursuit, but Caleb was smart enough to know that he was and had always been a fool.

When the gas had poured in after Essek had left them alone in the warehouse, Caleb didn’t feel surprised. He would never again feel shock at a betrayal. But he could not lie and say he felt no pain.

As his eyes slid closed against his will as they battered themselves against the door, he hoped some remnant of his life would still be there when he woke up. He did not want to admit how much it would hurt him to lose them all. He still could hardly think from the pain of losing Mollymauk.

It was in these moments that he wished he did not love them, because if he could only love nothing there would be nothing that the world could take from him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for sticking with me through that one! Caleb's head is an interesting, but not necessarily healthy, place to be--at least at this point in time. but there's hope for the future!
> 
> also TIL it's spelled "eadwulf" and not "eodwulf"
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoyed! I can't believe this is the last of the interlude chapters. I fell in love with writing them, so I hope it comes across <3


	16. Chapter 16

Beau heard a notification on her phone just as they pulled in to the parking lot Essek had driven to. She hadn’t even glanced at the thing since the message from the previous morning, and when she pulled it out—yes. A missed call from her mother. She tossed it on the floor of the car, not about to be caught while sneaking in because of an ill-timed beep.

She stared up at the intimidating facility, and wished she was better at all of this.

"Stop that, I’m trying to fucking think,” Beau snapped. Essek stopped drumming his fingers anxiously against the steering wheel, a slight flush coloring his cheeks.

It was an innocuous building if you didn’t know what it was for—just a gray office building that could be anywhere. They were only a few hours south of the airport, but there wasn’t much else around this area. It was somewhere you might drive past and never notice. But knowing what it was for…

“Why the fuck does Homeland Security have a facility in Canada, anyway?” Beau snapped, her worry making her more irate than usual.

“I don’t know if this is _strictly_ governmental,” Essek said. “But even if it was, would it be the first time the United States operates outside of nation lines?”

She rolled her eyes, not wanting to admit he was right. “I don’t suppose you have any great ideas about how to get in. Fuck, I wish we had Nott.”

Essek didn’t say anything, which was about what she had expected from him.

“Well, we can’t wait in this parking lot forever. They’re going to notice your car,” she pointed out. She gritted her teeth and sucked in a harsh breath. She thought about Yasha’s blank face when she’d been tranquilized back at their safehouse. Were they all lying catatonic in that building somewhere, waiting for god knows what terrible thing to happen to them?

“I will say, I don’t think they have any more of the gas,” Essek said. “They had me procure it for them specially. It was… I thought that they would use it at the house, too.”

“I just _love_ hearing about how you all the ways you betrayed my friends’ trust,” Beau spat, “but thank you for the minimal information, I suppose. Anything else?”

“They’ll probably have them in some kind of lab,” he theorized. “Ludinus wants to know why you are all… the way you are. He was supposed to just do some tests and let everyone go, but… I’m not confident he’ll keep his word, anymore.” Essek sighed, pinching his nose between his fingers. To see visible frustration on his face made him seem more human.

Beau unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned over to grab her makeshift staff.

“Are you just… going in?” Essek asked.

“Whatever plan I make is just going to go wrong the second I get in there, so might as well,” Beau said. “If you wanted elaborate, you should have made sure they didn’t kidnap my entire team.”

“I’m coming with you,” Essek said.

Beau laughed without much humor. “No you’re not,” she said. “As much as I’m fucking pissed at you—and let it be known, I am fucking _pissed_ —I get the feeling they wouldn’t appreciate me dragging you along to die before they can tell you to fuck off themselves. Unlike me, you can die, remember?”

Essek looked down in shame. “I… I can help,” he said. “I have more power than you think.”

“Uh huh,” Beau said. “Stay in the car.” She got out without another word to him, but paused at the half-open window before she left. “If I don’t come out within half an hour… well… just don’t let him keep us in a prison for the rest of our lives.”

“I would never allow that to happen,” Essek said. As furious as she was with him, there was a genuine nature to his expression.

Beau nodded and walked away from the car, internally cursing the fact that she had no choice but to trust someone who had literally betrayed her to her face less than half a day earlier. Still, she was in desperate straits. She didn’t have much choice in her allies. 

Beau was surprised at how easy it was for her to reach the upper floors of the facility. She supposed it was a research facility in the middle of nowhere, and they didn’t exactly expect anyone to come after the Nein—certainly not so soon. Still, it felt almost laughable when she deftly pickpocketed an ID off of a group of scientists out for a cigarette break. That’s what they got for leaving their coats unattended.

She kept both hands on her staff as she made her way around corners, ready to deal a good whack in the face to anyone who dared to stand against her. She was ready for a fight, and the immortality didn’t exactly hurt.

It wasn’t a shock when her luck ran out, and she heard a gunshot ring out. A horrible pain ripped through her shoulder, but before she could even fully turn around she could feel the wound healing. Fjord had told her that her wounds would begin to heal faster and faster, but she hadn’t really known what he meant until now.

A duo of guards, who looked more like army or police in their uniforms, stood there. “Identify yourself,” the one with his gun raised said. “The next shot will be your head.”

Beau cracked her neck and raised her staff. “Try it, asshole.” Before they could move, she rushed forward. She quickly swept one guard off of his feet, and the other tried to do what he’d said and aim for her head.

She heard an incredibly loud sound as the gun went off directly next to her ear, but the bullet only grazed her. Her ears were ringing and she felt blood trickling down the side of her scalp, but she was easily able to seize the gun and slam the stock against his forehead. He crumpled, and she quickly tackled the one she’d knocked down, gripping him in a headlock. It took only a few moments for his struggling to weaken, and she let him slip to the floor unconscious. A part of her wished Dairon could see her in this moment. As he collapsed, she quickly searched his body for any weapons she could use.

Knowing she didn’t have much time, she sprinted forward. She must have been seen on the cameras, because guards were gathering in every hall she could see. Still, if there were this many around, it was probably a sign she was in the right part of the building.

She spotted a metal, reinforced door at the end of one hall. There was a group of guards gathered near it, but she had recovered a goodie from the unconscious duo she’d left behind.

With her teeth, she ripped the pin out of the grenade and tossed it. She hunkered down around the corner, and heard panicked shouts from the group inside.

There were raised voices and the patter of running feet, and then the ground shook with an explosion as it went off. The blast had been small, but it had been enough to scare off the guards and, from the looks of it, dent the metal door. She ran straight over to it, hearing the sounds of pounding feet as the rest of the floor’s occupants headed right for her.

Beau slammed her entire body against the metal door, slightly off its hinges from the explosion, but it was still holding strong. She wished she had Yasha with her, but instead ran across the hall, steeling herself. She threw herself against it again and then a third time, but it was still only moving by centimeters.

Another group of guards was approaching her, and as she pushed against the door it still had no give. One of them was arming what looked like some kind of launcher, and she felt a spark of inspiration.

Beau pushed against the door with all her might, watching them arm the weapon, and then as soon as they backed away from it, she threw herself away from the door. The launcher fired, and she felt her skin burn as the debris flew back, but she missed the majority of the blast and she could already feel her skin beginning to knit itself back together in places.

She sprang to her feet, coughing from the acrid smoke, but she saw that the blast had dented the door even further, just as she had hoped. She gave the door a spinning kick, and with that final burst of power she saw it begin to fall inward, enough for her to be able to squeeze through the broken gap in the door.

The other members of the Mighty Nein were lined up in hospital cots in a long room. Their hands were locked down in metal cuffs, but they all looked up as Beau forced her way through the wreckage. She felt a rush of relief to see them all looking relatively unharmed.

“Beau!” Jester cheered.

“Thought that might've been you,” Fjord said with a smile.

“Sorry it took me so long,” Beau grunted. She looked around for some kind of release button for the cuffs, banging and crashing sounds already beginning from the hall outside. The one upside of the guards’ bulky bulletproof uniforms was that unlike Beau, they weren’t going to be able to get in through the small space in the door.

“Red button!” Nott said, indicating with her head towards some kind of switchboard. She stared at it, not recognizing anything, but just as Nott said there was a small red button.

Beau slammed it. Faint clicking sounds came from all the way down the line, and the Nein began to sit up, rubbing their wrists. All except one.

Yasha was still lying there, eyes closed. Beau sprinted to her side, but her cuffs had been released like all the others. Her face looked pale and still, and Beau felt like her heart was stuck in her throat.

“She’s been sedated,” Caduceus said gently from beside her. “She put up a real fight once we all woke up.”

Beau felt a rush of relief, checking Yasha’s wrist for a pulse. It was there, strong as ever. She let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding, feeling truly faint and shaky for the first time in this wild escape.

“Help me with her,” she said, and Jester ducked under Yasha’s arm as Beau pulled her up on one side. As they did so, however, Yasha stirred under their touch.

“Yasha?” chirped Jester. “You awake?”

“Jes…ter…?” Yasha said, words half-slurred, but her eyes were open now, and gaining lucidity by the second. Beau supposed her super-healing had taken the tranquilizers out of her system much faster with Lorenzo, too. “…Beau?”

Within moments, Yasha could sit up by herself, while the others walked over to a set of storage lockers. Nott was quickly able to crack the combination lock, and they were all holding their bags and weapons. Beau glanced over at Yasha worriedly, but she looked completely recovered and powerful as ever with her huge sword in hand.

“I like your staff!” Jester said to Beau, who was turning it over in her hands as the noises from the hallway grew louder. “Wait, just one more thing…” Jester pulled a blue ribbon out of a small pocket in her jacket, and tied it around the end of Beau’s makeshift weapon. Beau flipped it over in her hands, enjoying the way the ribbon blurred to a flash of blue when it was in motion.

“Thanks,” she said. Jester grinned.

“You haven’t really seen us in action all together, have you, Beau?” Fjord asked. He polished the edge of his wicked-looking curved sword against his coat.

“Guess not,” she said, grinning back at him. “It’s about time.”

They were all ready, when the door finally came crashing in, and the guards never stood a chance. Fjord was right—she never really had seen them all work together.

Beau had heard people compare fighting to dancing in the past, but she’d never fully understood what it meant before this moment. The Mighty Nein were a seamless waltz. Every time one person turned, another was at their back, with motions so practiced it was like they could read each other’s minds.

She stayed on the fringes of the group, learning their motions slowly. Nott fired a bolt from her crossbow and ducked behind Caleb as he fired off a spurt of flame. Yasha slashed through their attackers like a knife through butter, and Jester was there to strike out at the one guard who evaded Yasha’s sweeping blow with a blow of her own. Fjord batted away guns with his sword with practiced skill, treating the shooting match like a swordfight and yet somehow still winning with ease. Even Caduceus’s staff, which she hadn’t seen before, hit with perfect aim as he knocked their opponents to the ground or swept their limbs out from under them.

It wasn’t so much a battle as it was a force of nature sweeping their attackers aside with ease. Within moments, they were standing alone and unimpeded in the room.

“Woah,” Beau said, and Fjord smirked back at her.

“Thank you for coming, Beau,” Jester said earnestly.

“…How did you find us?” Caleb spoke for the first time. His face still looked drawn and gaunt.

“Essek,” she confessed in a rush. “He… Well, I can’t tell you he didn’t betray us. He did. But he did take me here.”

“But… why?” Nott asked, face betraying her clear suspicion.

“He is…” Caleb sighed. “He is a complicated man.”

“Doesn’t look that complicated from where I’m standing,” Nott said. “He fucked us over! Big time!”

“Let’s wait until we have all of the information,” Caduceus said in a placating tone.

Jester frowned. “Yeah… I want to believe he had a good reason, but…”

Beau sighed. “Well, he should be waiting outside. Assuming he didn’t bolt the second I left, which… is definitely a possibility.”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” Fjord said. “We still have to get out of here.” The rest of the group nodded, and they made their way cautiously out of the room.

For a few moments, Beau wondered if they had truly faced everyone in the facility back in the experimentation room. Their path was full of empty, white hallways, and no sound other than their own footsteps echoing back at them. But then a voice rang out, and she knew they couldn’t be so lucky.

“The Mighty Nein,” a calm voice said from behind them. “So nice to meet you all at last.”

Beau spun around, staff at the ready. But there was only one man behind them. It was the one she’d seen Essek talking to back at the warehouse. His skin was very pale, and his long white hair was still neatly tied back. He looked only slightly perturbed, as if they’d interrupted his conference call rather than breaking out of his facility. His eyes were a light gray, and the way they caught the light unnerved Beau.

“Ludinus,” Caleb said quietly.

“I’m sorry we had to encounter each other under such… unpleasant circumstances,” the man said, the words dripping out of his mouth with a grimace, as if they had a nasty taste. “But I am afraid I will need you to return to the laboratory.”

“Why the fuck would we do that?” Beau snapped. “No offense, dude, I think we can take you.”

“Oh, I’m sure you could,” Ludinus said. “But you won’t.”

“Why not?” Nott said. Her voice was tough, but something about the man’s tone was making them all nervous.

Ludinus revealed what he was holding in one hand at his side. It was a phone, and he tapped the screen. On it played a short video. It was footage of a dark house with several figures wandering around, hiding in the shadows, and Beau felt her stomach drop as she recognized it. Senator Prucine’s house.

An explosion rocked the side of the video’s frame, and the figures were caught in the blast. She sucked in air through her teeth, knowing what was coming next. It didn’t take long for the people to crawl back together, waking up from injuries that should have been fatal.

“If you do not return quietly,” he continued. “I will release this video immediately.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Beau saw Yasha’s grip tighten around her sword.

“Ah-ah-ah,” Ludinus said, clicking his tongue. “I wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t want my finger to slip… would you?” His fingers hovered around his phone, and Beau felt trapped. They could fight their way out easily, but… if they did, would they be able to continue to live, with their faces known all over the globe?

She saw the rest of the Nein pause, and knew that no one had a brilliant idea. Without a weapon in hand, Ludinus had them as thoroughly stuck as if he had thrown them in a prison cell. She eyed him, wondering if she would be fast enough to strike the phone out of his hand before he could press the button, but she was too far away and he was looking straight at them.

Fjord took a hesitant step forward, hands up as if to begin a placating speech. Before he had a chance to talk, however, a blur of motion came from around the corner from where they were standing. A figure who had been hiding behind Ludinus came lurching out of hiding, tackling him to the ground. The phone went skittering out of Ludinus’s hand, and with a furious snap it cracked under Yasha’s boot.

Essek, panting, was holding Ludinus’s arms above his head.

“Essek!” Jester said, smiling.

“…Essek,” Caleb said, different emotions flickering across his face before shuttering into a blank façade.

Essek looked over at them, expression pained. “I’m sorry,” he breathed, and then a shot rang out.

Even if Beau had been a thousand times faster than she was, she would have had no hope of getting there in time. A bullet ripped through Essek’s chest, right above his heart, from a sniper on a higher floor. With a roar of rage, a crossbow bolt from Nott buried itself in the guard, but it was too late.

Essek’s expression didn’t change as he crumpled, Ludinus crawling backwards away from underneath his body. He simply jerked once and then went still, blood dripping onto the floor around him in a pool.

Caleb made an awful noise, crashing to his knees. His eyes had the same blankness that Beau recognized from Lorenzo’s attack, where he seemed to be witnessing something a thousand miles away.

The rest of the group surged forward, surrounding their former friend and betrayer. He lay still on the ground, and as Caduceus gently rolled him onto his back, he shook his head.

“There’s… nothing we can do?” Jester asked, voice very small.

“He’s gone,” Caduceus said softly.

Using their distraction, Ludinus attempted to make a break for the door, but without even looking at him Yasha stepped in his path and knocked him over the head with the butt of her sword. He fell, instantly unconscious.

The room felt very still. Beau looked at the pained expression on Essek’s face, and not for the first time in the last few days wondered if they were cursed rather than blessed. He had betrayed them, yes, but he had also given his life trying to protect them. Without him, they wouldn’t have been imprisoned, but without him, they wouldn’t have been freed.

Essek gasped and opened his eyes. They all jerked backwards, shock painting everyone’s faces. He coughed deeply, and leaned forward, pulling himself into a seated position. Beau rushed up towards him, and before her eyes saw the wound in his chest close.

“You _motherfucker!”_ she said. “I told you to stay in the car!”

“Sorry,” said Essek breathlessly. “I told _you_ I had more power than you thought.”

Not knowing what else to do, Beau punched him in the shoulder. “That’s not what you should have said and you fucking _know_ it.”

“Yes… I do,” Essek said.

The rest of the group had taken a few steps back, and Caleb was slowly rising to his feet. He looked like some clarity was returning to him, and anger and pain painted his face before slowly fading.

“You are… like us…?” Caleb said. “For how long…?”

“A very long time, my dear friend,” Essek said. “There are… no words to tell you how sorry I am.”

Caleb walked up to Essek, kneeling next to him. “Tell me,” Caleb said. “What… please tell me.”

“You deserve to know,” Essek said with a sigh. “I have been deeply, deeply selfish. I know this, but it did not stop me from behaving… terribly. I will understand if you never forgive me.”

“So you were immortal the whole time, and you sold us out anyway?” Beau said. “If you wanted to know what makes us tick so bad, why didn’t you submit _yourself?”_

“I…” Essek paused. “You are right. I did not think you would come to any real harm, but… there is no excuse. I was a coward, and a self-serving coward at that.”

“…Molly is dead,” Yasha said quietly.

“I…” Essek trailed off, face pained. “I did not even know that was possible. But… it doesn’t matter. It won’t change what I’ve done.”

Yasha eyed him closely, but her expression was unreadable.

“What was your _goal?”_ Nott said, looking towards Caleb with anger and worry in her voice.

“I wanted to find a way out of this eternal life,” Essek said. “Does it not plague you? I have been alive for so long, and caused so much harm. To my family, to people I have loved and respected… I believed I was entirely alone. I did not know if it was possible for it to end. But I had to try.”

“To… end it?” Jester said. “But… this can be a gift, too, Essek.”

“It has not been one for me,” Essek said.

“You met us, though,” Nott said. “You’re not alone.”

“I know,” Essek said. “But by the time I met you… my plans were far along. I did not think that I needed anything other than to achieve my goals. I had never met someone with the resources I needed before Ludinus. It felt like all the pieces were lining up, except… I realized I did not wish to betray you. I had ingratiated myself with you to gain knowledge, but I did not count on the fact that I would—that I would enjoy your company so much.”

Caleb had a deeply sad expression on his face, and took Essek’s hand in his. “I understand what you have felt,” he said. “It is not impossible for you to change the course of your life from this point. You do not need to be alone.”

“It is _you_ who do not understand,” Essek said, clenching Caleb’s hands between his emphatically. “I am… I am irredeemable. What I have done to you all…”

Caleb smiled faintly. “Please believe me when I tell you I know what it is to be irredeemable,” he said. “But I do not believe you are it.”

“I know you didn’t mean to hurt anyone, really,” Jester said.

“You forgive me far too easily,” Essek said.

Caleb paused. “Make no mistake. You have betrayed us, and you have hurt us. And there will be consequences. But… you are like us, and I believe that means we are all meant to be together.”

Essek looked up at all of them, face tight with suppressed emotion.

“One hundred years feels right,” Caduceus said, glancing around at the rest of them. The rest nodded, and Beau looked at them, confused. Even Yasha inclined her head, eyes full of pain.

“One hundred years…?” Beau asked.

“One hundred years, and then he can join us,” Nott said. “A little time to think about what he’s done. For… for Molly.”

Essek leaned forward, eyes closed. “Yes,” he said. “That is… more than fair. I am… I am so deeply sorry.”

Jester pointed at him, face stern. “But you better still be here in a hundred years, okay? We don’t invite people to the Mighty Nein lightly, got it?”

Essek smiled faintly. “If I know I have something other than isolation to look forward to, I can live for another millennia.”

Caleb leaned forward, kissing Essek gently on the forehead. Essek leaned into his touch, but pulled away before more than a moment had passed. The two stared into each other’s eyes, and Beau looked down, feeling slightly like she was intruding.

“If you really need me,” Caleb said. “I will be here.”

Essek looked up at them, eyes filled with indescribable emotion. “I will… I will find you in one hundred years,” he said. He stood up slowly, and Caleb stood with him. The two of them stood for a moment, hands still linked, and then Essek broke the contact. “Do not worry about Ludinus. I will… take care of the situation.”

The Nein nodded, and Essek took a few steps away, and then paused.

“Goodbye,” Essek said, and before they could respond he had disappeared into the endless halls of the facility. 

The group thundered along the road, new van acquired from Ludinus’s facility. Beau had no idea where they were, but honestly, she didn’t care. They were all back together, bumping along the highway under gray skies.

“Thank you for coming for us, Beau,” Yasha’s voice said quietly from beside her.

“Well, I wasn’t going to leave you there,” Beau said.

She felt Yasha’s arm pressed up against her, and remembered the cold feeling she’d had when for just a moment, she’d believed the other woman was gone forever. The dance they’d shared, and the quiet conversations. In a way, it didn’t feel like the right time yet, but in another, she felt like she was more aware than ever that there wasn’t always a second chance.

“Yasha…” Beau began, and then paused nervously. She looked around at the rest of the Mighty Nein, but the majority of them were asleep. Only Caleb sat with his eyes open, and he was just staring out at the endless sky.

“…Yes,” Yasha said.

“I—I figured we probably have a lot of time ahead of us,” Beau said. “But—we can never be sure, right? So… feel free to tell me to fuck off, but… would you maybe wanna go out with me sometime? As in, like, a date?”

Yasha looked at her. “I said yes.”

“Oh,” Beau said, feeling like a weight had been lifted. “I—I didn’t understand.”

“No,” Yasha said. “It was very nice to be asked. It feels odd, in a situation like this, but I feel very… excited. And happy. So thank you, Beau. I would very much like to go on a date with you.”

“Oh,” Beau said. She lapsed into silence, but she allowed herself to lean slightly more against Yasha’s arm. It had been an incredibly bizarre few days, and Beau knew with absolute certainty that her life would never be the same.

But here, out on the open road with a woman she was beginning to love and friends like she’d never had, she felt okay with the fact that she had no idea what was coming next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaand that's the finale! Last chapter is the epilogue, which should be up tomorrow.
> 
> Writing this fic has meant a LOT to me, so thank you all for reading it & commenting! And thank you as always to comfortcharacters for beta-ing, and to asmaranth and comfortcharacters for helping me with the characters' historical origins!! <3


	17. Epilogue - Six Months Later

Beau took a deep breath, and then knocked. The door was metal-plated and utilitarian in design, ugly but functional. The extra security on the door was pointless because the surrounding walls were glass, but her father had never really appreciated this when she’d pointed it out to him.

It took a few minutes for anyone to appear. She saw her mother’s silhouette through the glass. Her mother clearly recognized her, from the way that her footsteps came to a sudden halt before she continued towards the door.

Her mother’s face was ashen when she opened the door, and before Beau could speak her mother gathered her into a tight hug. She returned it hesitantly, feeling her mother shaking slightly.

“We thought you were dead,” breathed her mother. “The hospital… and then… where did you _go?”_

“I’m fine, Mom,” Beau said, pulling back slightly so she could look at her mother’s face. It had been a few years since they had seen each other, but her mother looked much the same, just with a few extra stress lines around her eyes.

“Please, come in,” her mother said, drawing her inside and shutting the door. Her mother kept touching her arm, as if unsure that she was real. “Let me find your father and your… and your brother.”

“…What’s his name?” Beau asked.

“Thoreau Junior,” her mother responded, eyes downcast, and then she swept quickly from the room. Beau was left alone in the open area by the front door. Nothing had changed—all of the same abstract paintings and sculptures that her father had bought not because he liked them, but by virtue of their expense alone. She had hated them growing up, but she found a strange familiarity in them now. Maybe it was because she knew it was the last time she would see them.

Her mother returned in a moment with a baby wrapped in her arms. “Your father is coming,” she said breathlessly. “Here, this is your sister, Beauregard,” she said to the baby. He cooed.

“Hi, TJ,” Beau said, leaning over the baby. She extended a finger, feeling strangely nervous. The baby closed his hand over her finger, and she shook it slightly as if shaking his hand. “Nice to meet you, too.” TJ giggled, and she smiled back at him.

“Beauregard,” came a voice from the door. Beau stood up abruptly, and her father was standing there. Unlike her mother, he seemed to have aged more severely in the last few years. His hair was beginning to go gray, and he looked tired.

“Father,” she responded with the same cold tone.

“Where have you been…?” he said, aiming for a tone of nonchalance. There was something else in his voice, though, that even he couldn’t hide. Worry for her, perhaps? It was difficult to be sure.

“I’ve… found my calling,” she said. “I’m working out in the world.”

“Doing what?” her mother said. “Are you all right?”

“Doing good, I hope,” Beau said. “Listen, I don’t… I don’t really know what to say. I just came to tell you that I’m going away.”

“Going away?” her father asked.

“Yeah,” she said with a sigh, running her hand through the shorn side of her hair. “My friends and I are going on a work trip, far away. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“Beauregard… what are you wrapped up in? Are you in danger?” her mother said, clutching baby TJ close to her chest.

Beau almost laughed. “No, I’m perfectly safe. And I’m not doing anything bad, I swear it. But I can’t really talk about what I’m up to. It’s… confidential work.”

Her father eyed her closely. “… _Legal_ confidential work?”

“Don’t worry, father, I won’t embarrass you,” Beau spat. She was trying to be polite, knowing that this might be the last time she ever saw them. But old wounds didn’t close so easily.

“That’s… all right,” her father said. “This is just… it’s a bit of a shock.”

“Will you stay for dinner?” her mother asked. “We have a lot to talk about.”

Beau sighed. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll stay for dinner.”

She sent a quick text to Jester, alerting the Mighty Nein that she didn’t need backup. She had promised she’d be fine, but they had insisted on coming with her. But this was a goodbye she had to do on her own.

Beau knew as she ate and talked with them that the pain of her childhood would always be with her, even if she had years to resolve her issues with her parents. She wasn’t even sure it was something that could or should be resolved. They had hurt her deeply, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever be ready to forgive them. But she was grateful for the chance to spend one last evening with her family, before she decided exactly how she should leave them.

When she left for the night, she kissed TJ’s forehead softly and whispered something only he could hear, although she knew he didn’t understand it. “I’ll always be there for you, kiddo,” she said. “Always.”

She gave her father an awkward hug, his arms flailing as he wasn’t sure where to put them, and gave her mother a tight one as well. There was pain in her mother’s eyes, as if she was aware of how final this goodbye might really be.

“Be safe, Beau,” her mother said softly.

“You don’t need to worry about me, Mom,” Beau said. “I’ll be okay. I promise.”

“…Goodbye, Beauregard,” her father said. She locked eyes with him, and the coldness that was eternal in them seemed to soften slightly.

“Goodbye,” Beau said.

She walked out of the house and into the surrounding nature. As soon as she was out of sight of the house, she dropped into a kneeling position on the ground. Sobs shook her body, and she wasn’t even completely sure what was causing them. It was the pain of seeing them again, of her lonely childhood, of leaving it all behind forever. It was the pain of knowing that someday soon, none of what she had grown up with would be left, while she would remain.

“Beau!” came a call from the street. She looked up, eyes still wet with tears, and saw a figure leaning out of the back of a van. Jester waved to her.

“Sorry, but we didn’t leave,” Caduceus called from the driver’s seat. “We thought you might need us.”

Beau walked towards them, wiping the tears away, and clambered in the back. Jester quickly wrapped her in a hug, while Yasha rubbed soft circles on her back. She looked up at all of their worried faces, and knew that at least as she remained everlasting, she would not be alone.

She took a deep breath, allowing the pain to flow through her, and knowing that one day it would fade. She gave them a watery smile. “Thanks.”

Late that night, Beau turned over to curl into Yasha’s arms. Yasha was half-asleep, so she just grumbled something and pulled her arm around Beau’s back more tightly.

“…Are you okay, Beau?” Yasha said, eyes blinking open blearily.

“Yeah,” Beau said, resting her head against Yasha’s shoulder.

“It is a lot,” Yasha said quietly. “But… you will eventually get used to it. There are always new things to live for.”

“I never really lived for my parents anyway,” Beau said. “But… I don’t want to hurt them.”

“Sometimes there are no other options,” Yasha said. “Our choices do hurt the people we love. Even if we do not want it to happen.”

Beau nodded, playing with one of Yasha’s braids as they lay there. “I know,” she said.

“Knowing doesn’t make it better, right?” Yasha said.

“Right.”

Yasha shifted, so she was facing Beau’s head. They just lay there, staring at each other. Yasha leaned forward and touched her forehead to Beau’s.

“We will be here for you,” Yasha said. “ _I_ will be here.”

“Thank you,” Beau said. She pulled her head back, wanting to see Yasha’s eyes. “I… I love you.”

Yasha blinked at her. “I love you too.”

Beau leaned in for the kiss. Being with Yasha felt as natural as breathing, and when their faces met she felt like they fit together perfectly.

It was the day of the six-month anniversary of Molly’s death, and the group was headed back to Las Vegas. Beau had been the one to suggest it, noticing the way the group’s eyes were mournful during breakfasts, the way that Jester’s hands would linger over the most colorful fabrics when they went shopping. If they were all thinking about it anyways, they might as well make an occasion of it.

“Besides, we barely got the chance for a funeral last time,” Beau said.

“We will have to be very careful,” Caleb said. “That house is not safe anymore.”

“Well, hopefully Essek was true to his word about taking care of Ludinus,” she said, eyeing him. “But yeah, we should be on our toes.”

So they’d woken up early in the morning, flying out from New York to Vegas. Caduceus had one of their endless vans parked near the airport, and before long they were treading along familiar roads, sun fading from the sky. She remembered the last time they’d gone this way, the group sleeping off Molly’s drinking contest.

Beau leaned her head against Yasha, pulling her girlfriend closer with one arm. Yasha had been very quiet all week, but Beau understood why. She would be there until Yasha was able to overcome this pain, no matter how long it took.

“…We’re here,” Caduceus said softly. Night had fallen, and Nott went first to confirm that the place was empty while they waited several blocks away. Before too long, she called Caleb to tell him that the place looked clean and empty. All the bodies were gone, too—probably Essek’s doing.

It was a silent procession as they made their way towards the house, and Beau blinked up at the sky in confusion as a few raindrops hit her as they walked. She wasn’t aware it ever rained in Vegas.

The rain came down more strongly as they approached, and she felt like the world was somehow sensing their moods as thunder boomed from somewhere far away.

They were all drenched by the time they walked in the front door, Nott waiting for them inside. The house looked untouched, and only a few faint scorch marks on a doorframe revealed that anyone had ever attacked them. Beau ran her finger over them, remembering the bodies that had been strewn over the hardwood floors months earlier.

They didn’t wait too long, all heading towards the backyard. There was no question of whether to wait for better weather. They had come here to do something, and they were going to do it.

As they approached the door to the yard, Yasha stopped. Her eyes were wide, staring outside. Beau couldn’t make out what she was seeing, so she walked forward, pulling open the door and stepping out into the dark rain.

Beau looked out, and finally saw what Yasha had seen. Her hands flew to her mouth in shock. The rest of the Nein filed outside, and they all stared. No one spoke.

Where Molly’s grave had been was an empty hole. Even as the rain turned the dirt to mud, the visual was clear. His body was gone.

“He climbed out of a grave once,” Fjord said very quietly. “Did… could he have done it again?”

Beau heard someone clear their voice behind her and spun around, looking into the darkness. There was a figure emerging from the rain, but she couldn’t quite make out who they were.

“My apologies,” the voice came out of the blackness, familiar but with an edge Beau didn’t recognize. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

The man who had been walking towards them finally stepped out into the light, and Beau felt all her words leave her for the second time in a moment.

Molly smirked. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind me asking, who are you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ohhhh my god can't believe it's over! I will probably be doing some one-shots in this universe if the inspiration strikes me, but for now that's all! I wanted to leave things a little open-ended because I want to see how they go down in canon, so... please don't hate me! :D
> 
> this has been a hard year and this fic gave me a lot of joy, so thank you all for reading!! and thank you for comfortcharacters for reading all ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY FIVE pages of this for me!!! please go check her out if you are into p5/haikyuu/banana fish!
> 
> love you all!!! <3 <3 <3
> 
> if you want to talk to me/yell at me on tumblr, i'm aurbiter!


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